#they are so ignorant and refuse to do basic research on how animation industries work and how many years it takes to write and create a show

[overthinkingtaleblr]

Hey. Having a bad week day right now and your blog is a huge comfort. Can I request some fluffy headcanons for PIE?

Of course! I'm a couple days late because I was swamped with work when the ask came in, but this has been living rent-free in my head for the past 24 hours. PIE has SO MUCH potential for headcanons, it would be amiss to not to touch on the softer side of things! I like to think that PIE was a turn for the better in all of their lives, and I do want to see them happy in spite of my open adoration of dramatics.

Time to let them be happy 🥺 I may have gotten carried away. Everything is under the cut! There are a LOT of words and I don’t expect everyone to read it all at once, it’s okay if it’s too much/you need to stop and come back to it later ^^;

Fluffy PIE Headcanons For The Soul (and Anon <3)

Personal Fluff

Colon actually didn’t believe in ghosts before his first mission with PIE. He just thought Ghost was interesting, and wanted to see what the job of a “paranormal investigator” entailed. He was already a bit of a hobbyist, reading some books about them for fun instead of thinking it was real. Since being introduced, he’s dived headfirst into exploring the paranormal and some types of magic. He feels like a whole new world has been opened up to him.

Colon loves the idea of being a parent some day and has done quite a bit of research to learn how to be properly responsible of children. He was considering being a teacher when he first entered college, but he preferred studying forensics to teaching it.

Because Colon is the only one of the team who has never met any of the other members of the team until adulthood, they don’t know anything about his family. Sometimes he just makes things up because he genuinely thinks they’re making things up with how crazy their families sound. They take him at face value.

Though he’s doing way better now that he’s older, Colon had some notable health issues while growing up, and is no stranger to hospitals and medical procedures. Taking care of his own health and taking note of his symptoms and what caused them has made him very good at giving advice when others are feeling sick, meaning he’s very on-top of making sure everyone is taking care of themselves (if they come to him first, he’s not here to pry). Especially Ghost.

Colon has a kind of beautiful and deep singing voice… but he only ever sings show tunes since he did a lot of theater growing up.

Ghost is usually very prickly, but gets more friendly to social and physical interactions when tired. This usually means he actually ends up more touch-friendly during all-night missions.

Growing up, Ghost’s dads taught him to sew and repair his own clothes when he was in middle school. Meaning in middle school and early high school, he had a variety of fun and interesting patches on his clothes.

Part of the reason why Ghost is so annoyed about being confused for the Ghostbusters is that he really feels like they “ruined” public perception of paranormal investigators in general. Despite his irritable nature, he’s aware that there is more to his job than deleting ghosts from existence and seeing every undead as a threat.

This is also why so much of the team’s tools and machines are home-constructed because he refuses to buy tools that the Ghostbusters sell or are associated with and they are kind of an industry giant. Also they were given some training by his dad but he likes to ignore that.

Ghost actually can read, he’s just super dyslexic and he’s basically decided he doesn’t even want to try if he’s going to be such an annoying struggle.

Spooker has a massive collection of stuffed animals that he treats with incredible love and care.

Spooker is actually allergic to cats, but loves cats and cat-themed things. He is willing to cuddle with a kitty if it means he has to suffer itchy eyes and sneezing. Won’t stop him from complaining about the consequences, though.

Technically out of the whole team, Spooker is both the least and most qualified member of the team. Part of the qualifications for the job is a degree in something that matches the field/industry, and Spooker doesn’t have that… what he DOES have is first-hand experience with the paranormal since BIRTH. He thinks that this is the funniest thing.

Spooker has everyone’s coffee/not coffee orders memorized and sometimes buys for the team on days where he feels he can take the detour.

Whatever the opposite of a green thumb is, Spooker has been cursed for it. He has killed every plant that has passed through his hands unless it was somehow already dead. He’s gotten into flower pressing to make up for it, and presses flowers that represent important dates to him.

After developing an interest in art in university, Toast actually learned how to sketch borderline photorealism, and has tons and tons of doodles in his writings. Buildings they explored on their journeys, sketches of the ghosts they encountered, and a Lot of beautiful but haunting pictures of Mary… and Ghost.

Toast keeps a planner with important dates circled and underlined, including the date everyone joined the team, everyone’s birthdays, and other important dates that may need celebration or revisiting.

In the PIE HQ, there’s a random tape of the Great British Bake-off mixed among all the other work VHS tapes by an old office TV. No one’s noticed it yet, but if they were to put it on, they’d see a college-age Johnny Toast featuring as one of the bakers in the episode. He looks so squishy.

Despite his job, Toast actually hates really scary horror movies and finds them to be a little too much. He can take supernatural-based movies since they feel so unrealistic to him, but the blood and gore in a lot of them is too much. Also, a lot of possession movies make him uncomfortable because he’s had to live through having someone he loves being possessed, and he doesn’t like how much it’s treated like the end-all be-all with few options.

Toast has a habit of feeding local stray animals, but doesn’t know all the local fauna and was feeding opossums for a long while thinking they were some kind of cat or bald rat or something, he didn’t want to ask.

Relationship Fluff

In order of who met first:

Johnny Ghost and Fred Soup

Surprisingly in first, Spooker first met Johnny Ghost when he was Gregory Casket. Spooker’s dad had several positive encounters with Timothy Casket and Johnny Ghost Senior, allowing for the two kids to have semi-frequent playdates. Ghost doesn’t remember this at all, but Spooker’s known since after the puppet arc. Spooker considers Ghost his oldest friend before of this.

Always the commanding kid, Gregory/Ghost actually came up with the nickname Spooker, it just stuck. Fred stopped going by the nickname around high school, but chose to take it up again because it just seemed to fit the paranormal investigating job.

Ghost has one-sided beef with Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza because of his time as a McDonalds manager in a city where everyone preferred pizza. Unknown to Spooker, this is most of the reason why Ghost was so annoyed during Spooker’s first mission. Ghost did Not want to be there and just wanted to leave as soon as possible.

Around when Chris first getting used to the team’s dynamic, he told Ghost that he’s far too critical to Spooker, so for about a week, Ghost tried holding himself back and being “nicer”. Spooker quickly caught on and told him that her liked that Ghost was honest and serious with him— even if it was kind of mean. He felt it meant that Ghost would always be honest with him and didn’t see him as someone who needed to be coddled.

Ghost was pretty openly mean about Spooker’s stuffed animals when he first joined the team, but got pretty used to them after awhile and will offer to repair them when one gets ripped or damaged so Spooker doesn’t get upset.

For his fifth anniversary with the team, Ghost made a big deal about not wanting to get anything for Spooker, only to present him with a hand-sewn stuffed animal with the PIE symbol on its little arms and back. Spooker cried.

Ghost tried to make him stop by saying that it was only made from scraps that Ghost had lying around from repairing the team’s stuff. Spooker cried harder.

He named the stuffed animal Tart and lets Woah sleep with it when she needs something to hold at night.

Johnny Ghost and Johnny Toast

Toast was actually seen as the problem child out of the two of them when they first met. Ghost was still kind of shell-shocked and processing his PSTD, and Toast was lashing out at anything because the sudden change in his lift was stressing him out. The two were sometimes paired together by the school’s faculty because they were hoping Ghost’s easy-to-startle nature would make Toast settle down. Instead, Ghost got more hectic as he worked through his problems, and Toast barely mellowed out as he adjusted to life in the States.

Ghost was the first person to really be there for Toast after what happened to Mary. He was the only one who really had an idea of what Toast was going through, and tried his best to give Toast the comfort that he would have wanted when he was going through his own grief. It was more effort than Toast was hoping for and really helped him in ways he didn’t know he needed.

Toast tried to go no-contact with his family around when he graduated University, and maintained it up until the founding of PIE. He saw how much working several jobs for all hours just to keep the lights at PIE on was wearing out Ghost, and reached back out to his family for the money so Ghost wouldn’t have to work so hard.

For the longest time, Toast’s Home Screen on his phone was him and Ghost making a hand heart together… in front of an explosion. Ghost had a similar one as his Lock Screen, except his was over a swallowing abyss, and his Home Screen was all black. Ghost thought it was funny, but Toast thought it was adorable that they matched.

Though he’s very prim and proper with the team, Toast is actually pretty messy when at home. He can manage his own stuff, but he struggles at keeping a tidy space. To make up for this, Ghost regularly marks days on the calendar when they’ll spend the morning cleaning before they go to work, and take note of what specifically needs focus throughout the week.

When Johnny Toast first got into cosplay, he would go to stores to get the outfits and wigs or buy them cheap online and try to grin and bear the quality. Ghost couldn’t help with the wig aspect, but he’d sew incredibly complicated outfit designs for Toast under the guise that he wanted to prove that the quality of the store-bought stuff was That Bad.

That’s part of why he doesn’t want to go anywhere with Toast while Toast is in cosplay because he’s actually kind of embarrassed of his earlier work but doesn’t want to make Toast retire his favorite outfits.

Both Toast and Ghost have had long enough hair to braid in the past (or present, for Ghost), and they’ve had moments of absent-mindedly braiding segments of each other’s hair.

Toast was Not the only person getting fangirls and stalkers, Ghost just looked at Toast, saw him as the hottest man on the planet, and went ‘yeah, that’s the only reason why they’re here.’

Johnny Toast and Fred Soup

Originally, Toast didn’t realize that Spooker was going to be a long-term member of the team, and he thought Spooker quit when he went missing halfway through the Puppet Arc. Realizing that Spooker lowkey sacrificed himself to try to save Ghost made Toast come around to him staying with the team… Spooker also didn’t realize Toast was the other member of the team until after Ghost got back, though. Only Ghost knows that they were both confused.

Spooker insists upon keeping track of the birthdays of ghosts that they see frequently, and Toast has begrudgingly began adding them to his planner. It does require trudging through graveyards or examining old records sometimes, and it can be a lot more work than anyone was asking for… but Toast is glad it makes Spooker happy.

Spooker loves Toast’s art and is trying to convince him to try coloring some of it with watercolors. Toast doesn’t want to admit that paint deeply confuses him, so he just lets Spooker do it for him.

Lacking blood when he’s spectral (a consequence of being half-ghost), Spooker actually struggles with generating his own body heat. On the other hand, Toast generates warmth faster when infected with lycanthropy. That being said, when both conditions are met, the two can consistently be found together, as close as possible.

Unexpected to Toast, Spooker actually knew several werewolves growing up and figured out Toast was a werewolf before anyone told him. This led to Spooker giving Toast some really good werewolf-coping advice up until he was properly cured, and Toast thinking it was just a really insane coincidence for like. A year after it.

Despite Spooker not really having a paycheck for literal years, Toast would find “sneaky” ways to pay him for his work. Toast thought he was slick, but Spooker just didn’t want to comment about how he was being given like 200 dollars for gas money and 500 dollars to restock the fridge at the base. He just thought it was like how Ghost was bad at reading and didn’t want to bring it up.

Spooker saw a picture of Toast with his hair long and in a ponytail soon after college and has been begging him to grow it out ever since then. He thinks Toast’s hair is literally angelic and can’t imagine why he likes it short. Toast just says he got sick of brushing ghost slime out of it.

Spooker can’t tell Toast and Gavin apart, to the point where he kind of doesn’t remember they’re different people after being explained that they are. Gavin feels horrible for tricking him because Spooker is always really nice to him, even after being told that he isn’t Toast. Toast thinks it’s funny, though.

Chris Ghostie and Johnny Ghost

Ghost was really friendly with Colon while he was driving Ghost to his location. It had been a long time since a stranger who was ignorant about the supernatural was actually interested in learning about it and wasn’t judgmental, weird, or gave Ghost a fake smile before brushing him off. They had a long, friendly conversation that mostly consisted in Ghost explaining how the paranormal worked from a professional perspective, which Colon was very receptive to. That’s the main reason why he allowed a stranger with no experience to come with him on a potentially dangerous mission. He thought Colon really had the chops for the job. And he was right.

Though Colon was initially very drawn to Ghost, there was a period of time where he doubted himself because Ghost could come off as kind of cruel to the other members of the team sometimes. It took him awhile to realize it was just a front and that Ghost had a very soft inside with a very prickly outside… that was also when he realized Ghost probably really liked him to start their friendship by exposing his soft side.

Colon originally found his nickname kind of annoying, but Ghost laughing about it actually made it grow on him over time. He’s found he’s grown more comfortable with it over time. Also, he’s found ways to make fun of Ghost back if it ever strikes a nerve with him.

Despite spending incredibly minimal time with the team compared to everyone else, Colon was able to tell the difference between Ghost and Casket incredibly easy. He’s started spraying Ghost with water when he suddenly spikes with Casket activity out of nowhere to startle Ghost back to attention.

He can also tell the difference between Johnny Ghost and Johnny Cranky almost immediately, but didn’t tell Cranky the first time the doppelgänger tried pulling one over on him. He made up a Ton of fake drama happening inside of PIE to freak Cranky out and circulate false information around DIE. At this point, he sees Cranky as the most unthreatening version of Ghost.

According to Colon, upon realizing Colon’s love of research and learning, Ghost appointed him the team teacher so that Colon could teach every newcomer to the team. According to Ghost, he gave Colon the job so he’d stop suggesting they hire or adopt every vaguely paranormal-inclined person and creature, because then they’d be his responsibility to deal with (he did not stop).

When Colon gets really excited about a book, he usually tells Ghost about it because chances are, Ghost is never going to read it so he really doesn’t care about spoilers. This is the only way that Ghost has ever actually gotten invested in books— fiction and nonfiction— because Colon is very, very thematic when he summarizes stories.

While Ghost was retired, Colon sent regular emails to Ghost’s work email as kind-of a diary. He figured that even if Ghost opened his work email, he wouldn’t read most of them, even if he sent something back. Ghost didn’t actually open his work email again until right before he was considering joining the team. Part him wanted to find it annoying, but it’s part of what eventually pushed him into joining back. He used TTS to read them all.

Fred Soup and Chris Ghostie

These two have the strongest stomachs to blood and gore on the team, and first started going over to each other’s places to watch horror movies together. They tried making it into a team thing, but had to stop making it a horror thing when they realized Ghost and Toast weren’t as into it.

When Spooker realized Ghost only recognizes him with the hat, it was Colon’s idea to dye his hair a bubblegum pink. He dyed streaks of his own hair a temporary blue in solidarity, but it was kind of hard to see without bleach.

Colon asked Spooker why he acts kind of stupid on the job, and Spooker explained that most ghosts would underestimate him if they thought he was stupid. Colon thought that as a little bit ingenious and will sometimes join in, much to Ghost’s tired annoyance. To be nice, Colon will take missions seriously when it’s just him and Ghost.

They started putting on Bluey for Woah to watch, but Colon quickly realized that some of the episodes counted as honest-to-god parenting advice and pulled Spooker into watching some of the episodes with him. He didn’t realize it would be actually kind of therapeutic for Spooker.

They have a Minecraft server together. Woah has her own special area that Colon used mod privileges around to ensure mobs wouldn’t spawn. They put their minecraft beds together.

Colon has a lot of dietary restrictions because of his. Whole relationship with specifically his colon, so Spooker went out of his way to learn new recipes and double-check some of his old recipes so Colon would always have something he could eat without a stomachache anytime Spooker cooks for the team. It took some experimenting, but they figured out a system, and Colon is really grateful.

In spite of getting all his information from Johnny ‘they are the most threatening, horrifying thing on the planet’ Ghost, he’s chosen to go out of his way to give Spooker’s demon cat plushie a chance. Though he is still a little suspicious about it getting too close to Woah.

Colon is the only member of PIE that Spooker has personally introduced to his dad without his dad knowing they were involved with PIE, meaning Colon is the only member of PIE who Chakalata likes. (He begrudgingly kept liking Colon even after finding out the truth.)

Chris Ghostie and Johnny Toast

Out of all the members of PIE, Toast was the only one Colon knew of before joining PIE. How? He’s read Toast’s book cover-to-cover. Several times. He has multiple sections and most of the cases detailed in that book memorized.

Colon is gradually and slowly trying to teach Toast to drive in return for more background information about Toast’s book.

A big reason why Toast doesn’t experience curses or magical afflictions as often as he used to isn’t really because they stopped coming, but because Colon started making him different charms and curse-repellants when he realized how often Toast suffers because of the supernatural. He is a little disturbed with how quickly Toast goes through them, but Toast is just relieved to have any break. At all.

Colon was incredibly excited of Toast’s cosplaying when he found out about it, and has offered to tag along with him to contests, or to dress up with him if he needs a double. They’re the closest to being the same size out of everyone on the team, so Colon can actually wear some of Toast’s older costumes if the need arises.

Colon is sometimes disappointed that he missed out on Toast being a werewolf (in cases where Toast gets cured and manages not to get it again) because the stories from Ghost and Spooker makes it sound way cuter than it actually was.

Toast and Colon are both incredibly organization-oriented, and both have different methods of keeping track of things. Sometimes they compare notes to make sure that they have everything since they tend to value different information.

I dunno if I said this anywhere else, but I’m dubbing these two as the biggest nerds on the team. They will talk fandom and understand what the other person is talking about. They compare tv shows and movies and talk about the state of the animation industry and how best to support actors. It’s fun and exciting.

He’s also really good at telling Gavin and Toast apart, but tends to doubt himself since Gavin will commit to the bit as hard as possible and he doesn’t want to make Ghost panic. Sometimes, Toast is Just that chaotic and that’s okay.

Team-Focused Fluff

Every primary member of the team can pick up and carry Ghost with relative ease. On days when Ghost is dazed or out of it for some reason, he has been picked up and carried by the nearest teammate in the chase.

Toast getting strong-armed into keeping track of the birthdays of ghosts has actually had the humanizing but unintended side affect of actually re-learning and teaching ghosts their own birthdays. They all react differently, some better some worse. Maxwell actually eased up on them. Aimee cried.

Colon has needed a surgery or two since joining the team, and absolutely everyone joined in to make sure he was as comfortable as possible. They did give him space and time to recover on his own, but they also went out of his way to make sure they had snacks he could eat and that he was always comfortable and had something to do. One time he was bored to a point that the usual methods wouldn’t fixed, so they set up a whole mystery in his room for him to solve without straining himself.

EVERYONE on the team has a story around biting someone that they were too young to remember but their parents thought were notable/hilarious. Spooker bit another kid while playing a game where everyone was an animal (~1yrs old - he was probably just teething, but his dad thought it was really funny), Ghost bit someone while he was being taken in after being found wandering in the woods (~7-8yrs old something his dads always noted as being a sign that he was a fighter— trying to spin it into a positive), Toast bit one of the servants who was taking care of him when they tried to pry as to why the usually chipper toddler was suddenly being so closed off (~4-5yrs old - his mother’s first red flag that something was happening to her children, but it would be another few years before anything was done about it), and Colon bit a doctor while dazed and waking up after a dental surgery (~7yrs - old his mother thinks it’s hilarious). They find it funny that THAT’S a distinct and notable thing they all have in common.

It’s really hard to get a babysitter for Woah. Options in the past have ranged from random teens in the paper (Woah just does whatever she wants since they can’t touch her), Maddie-Friend per Gertrude’s recommendation (overall really responsible, but usually busy with college or stalking), Spencer Acachalla to keep him from coming on missions after he forced himself onto the team (puts Woah on the coms while playing online games to make them think a six-year-old girl is destroying them… also managed to burn water), Poppy Soup per Spooker’s request (she invited friends over without realizing one of them was the ghost the team was after and got herself banned from babysitting… but was otherwise okay.), and Maxwell Acachalla (Colon was hoping it would be therapeutic. It actually kind of worked. He has no idea how to cook food.).

They have talked about starting a band, mostly as a joke. They kind of stopped talking about it when they realized they would technically be a boy band.

Everyone in the team is actually pretty okay at cooking. Spooker is the most skilled at cooking a lot of food at a time for a group of people, of course, but that’s not the only needed skill. Toast has an incredible attention to detail when picking out ingredients but struggles at measuring time, Ghost is adept at using replacements when lacking specific ingredients but doesn’t keep track of the level of nutrients he’s taking in at a time, and Colon is incredible at making a little go a long way but gets easily overwhelmed in a large kitchen. Also, Spooker most struggles at cooking for just himself, often making wayyy too many leftovers.

Casket will sometimes bore and start poking around with stuff if he can’t find anyone after finding himself in control with Ghost’s body. That’s how the team walked in on him trying and failing to sing Karaoke with Ghost’s hoodie around his neck like a cape after they left Ghost at home for a mission because he had a migraine. This was the most humanizing moment Spooker and Colon have ever had with Jimmy Casket. It was also incredibly embarrassing for Jimmy. He tried killing Toast for managing to get pictures and everything devolved into chaos, but Toast ultimately won.

Everyone tends to wear different styles outside of work than they do in work. Toast actually prefers to dress down and wear more casual, rugged, and loose-fitting clothes. Spooker likes colorful, flowing stuff with sparkles and loose bits. He has also done some bedazzling of some of PIE’s tools. Colon likes wearing a bit of an academia look or business casual and enjoys jewelry. The only exception is Ghost, nothing on the planet will get him to part from styling his entire outfit around an oversized hoodie and thick-soled combat boots. They only ever look coordinated when they’re on the clock.

They celebrate Halloween like no one’s business. They also Hate Halloween because of the spike of absurd cases— both fake and real. It’s kind of hard to tell someone they’re overreacting when there IS a chance that SOME GHOST is crazy enough to do JUST ABOUT ANYTHING just because it’s Halloween.

Thanks for asking, and I hope your week has improved as much as possible since you sent that ask <3

[xhanisai]

My days, the ML fandom has the most conceited individuals in the fandom compared to all the other ones I’ve been in.

We have a huge fanbase full of people from all over the country because Miraculous Ladybug is an international successful cartoon- not the other way around.

Yes, this fandom is full of amazing talent and skills and we have so much fanworks of all kinds to enjoy.

BUT

We are not the only aspect that’s making the show thrive so get off your high horses sheeeeesh.

Also, warning. Don’t ever comment on my work saying shit like “omg so much better than canon” I will fucking give you a tight slap in the ass.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S4 Ep16: Rex and Weevil Do Not Understand “Rock Bottom”

Hey guys.

Hey.

So... kind of crazy out there, right?

Well, you know what they say. When life gives you lemons, you watch Netflix.

Anyway, Yugioh is racing down this canyon that should be going up alongside the 101 and through the middle of many cities. Don’t worry about it.

And then I found out the name of a card I haven’t seen yet and wow it’s a name.

I’m really glad that Rex Raptor, dinosaur enthusiast, has just no idea how to name dinosaurs and does so like a 6 year old child. Hornsaurus.

(read more under the cut)

So this episode is mostly about Rex and Weevil’s tragic backstory, and thankfully, it’s really not that tragic. We’ve had SO MANY bizarre and weird backstories under our belt, that to have a completely normal one is just...wild to me. They’re so freakin normal.

And on the way, our train just...

OK Train...anyway, I’ll do my best to show which scenes are flash back and which are not, but like bear with me because it flashes back like every other scene it feels like.

So Rex waxes long about that very short time in which he and Weevil were the best ever duelists in Japan (other than Kaiba, I guess, who they failed to mention in this flashback.)

(I used to have a very soft performance fleece sweater the exact same shade as Weevil’s jacket there, popped collar and everything, with piping outline. Don’t judge me, it was the 00′s, I’m just shocked that Weevil also shopped at Old Navy.)

(However I have no idea what’s going on with Rex’s three layers of clashing outfit styles that he has going on. A turtleneck under a thick button up jacket under an open fringe jacket is so much of a 90′s vibe.)

Up until now, bro has been PRETTY SURE every episode that Rex and Weevil are originally from America. I don’t know how I feel about being so right on the money about this one when the episode outright said that they’re from Japan. I don’t really want to out-Yugioh my brother, because at some point, I’ll accidentally let slip that in writing this blog I have accidentally gained all Yugioh knowledge, just like Noah did that one time when he was stuffed into that brain orb.

Just please don’t don’t ask me how this game works, I still have absolutely no idea.

Weevil and Rex had adoring fans in two-shaded polos exactly just like the type I used to wear in high school. But, their fans all left them the moment Weevil lost one single game against Yugi Muto.

Harsh. But granted, I feel like the people of Domino have rabbit memories and if you aren’t actively in the news every day because your blimp got abducted by sea pirates, then who the hell is EVER going to know who you are?

But youknow, Rex and Weevil are pretty sure that dodging getting murdered by Pegasus was actually their last shot at fame. It’s over forever. They’re done. Done until they beat either Joey or Yugi which...very specific, but, it would make you somewhat famous if you did that by simultaneously destroying the Caltrain.

And Weevil is like gunning for the King of Games title but...apparently no one in this episode wanted to mention to Weevil that the “King of Games” moniker actually went to Raphael?

That he needs to beat Raphael...not Yugi Muto?

Nobody?

Nobody feels like mentioning that neither Yami nor Yugi could possibly still be King of Games and that Weevil has no really good reason to be here? I mean it would save Weevil a lot of time. It would also save me a lot of time. We could just walk off this train and go back to what we were all doing before this happened, but nah, lets keep the lie going, because apparently Yami can’t bear to tell the truth, just like his host.

Waiiiit, isn’t Rebecca the King of Games because she beat Yugi in S1?

It’s the freakin Malfroy/Elder wand, it’ll be important in Ch 40 I’m sure of it. I’m sure they’re not going to just...forget...all of the people that beat Yugi before.

Man. Maybe that’s why Yugi is so hell bent on keeping tabs on Rebecca? Just to youknow...make sure she doesn’t tell anyone that she hella beat him that one time because otherwise Kaiba would have lost his freakin mind (again) that Yugi lost that title basically the same afternoon he came back from Pegasus’ island.

Also Rex and Weevil once charged for headshots and this makes them vile, terrible people for some reason.

Apparently this is a bad practice? I mean if you’re famous enough please charge for head shots, you need to make money between playing cards. Take it from this jaded artist, always sell out so you can save money for when you will absolutely get carpal tunnel.

Whatever. Back to Rex who is certain that he is not famous anymore because he lost to Joey.

S4 and still everyone is certain that Joey is bad at cards. Joey will just never be free from this.

It was beautiful anime food for like ten seconds until he did this. How dare. Literally though, how did he do that? Was that burger made out of potato chips?

Can we talk about what a freakin crime it is I can’t watch my Nick at Night retro shows on Netflix or Hulu? Like hell I’m going to get a third streaming service so I can watch and admire how bad “I Love Lucy” aged. I want to see how incredibly off-putting Fonzie is as an adult. But nah. Not even allowed. You can only watch Cheers.

Cheers. What am I? 65? Cheers wasn’t on Nick at Night. My Mom watched Cheers. Gross.

This show trying to convince me so hard that Rex and Weevils lowest point wasn’t when they were 5 seconds away from being set on fire and having their soul removed by Maxamillion Pegasus.

Like for reals, the lowest point for ANYONE (except for the Ishtars) on this show was when they were trapped on that island, without any camping supplies, surrounded by human skulls, Bakura pre-exorcism, and so many other duelists who were probably going to eat them had the tournament gone 24 more hours than it had.

The island that also had a basement that was entirely full of cultists who absolutely murdered a guy right in front of us.

Like when they finally got out of the island’s huge ass forest, their dinner included a soup filled with Pegasus’ eyes.

I would have gotten pissed on by like 70 stray dogs to get off that island, y’all.

So one of the best things about this blog is I don’t have to worry about the restraint of a.) looking professional b.) the fear of sharing my actual real deal opinion. Everywhere else I post, I can’t share anything. I’ve come to terms with this, and so I hide my hot takes deep, deep within this Yugioh blog and the only people who suspect my art rage are like...y’all in the corner of Tumblr who do not care about what I’m talking about.

++++++++++++THIS IS MY HUGE RANT ABOUT ART POLITICS AND ART BITTERNESS FEEL FREE TO SKIP THIS. WE’RE QUARANTINING SO MUCH OVER HERE DUE TO THE VIRUS THAT I AM GOING A LITTLE BIT HOUSE CRAZY+++++++++++++++

But like MAN I need to mention something. Both Joey and Rex are completely off base. Both of them.

Like I’ll be real, because of the sudden extra time I have on my hands, I was originally ranting quite a bit about art culture and stuff and I will admit it was projecting somewhat onto a TV show that was written before the recession and the gig economy basically came and laid a huge dump across the creative industry.

However, I really, really, really don’t like it when people naively say “I’m successful because I did the research, I did the work, and then I got a following despite doing no marketing at all,” LIKE HELL YOU DID, DUDE. And there’s certain places I go where this is the mantra of a hell ton of ppl who don’t believe in luck, and I have to just suck it in because they succeeded at a young age. Because inversely, if anyone doesn’t succeed right away--clearly they don’t work hard enough, right?

I won’t dig into real world stuff because that’s...the real world and the real world is a bummer, but even in the universe of Yugioh there’s this crazy disparity in duelers that the people on the top refuse to acknowledge and the people on the bottom have absolutely no way to cope with so they become insanely bitter about it.

Mai has mentioned that despite all of her hard work and success--because she isn’t the top 4 duelists of Kaiba’s tourney--no one knows who she freakin is. The card industry is so toxic, that even KAIBA dropped out.

And even without Kaiba to compete against anymore, Mai still wasn’t able to get in there to fill that void. The void that also has Marik and Odion in it, despite the fact that I’m pretty sure Marik will never touch a card ever again and might be back to living underground or on a boat in the middle of no-where. And we don’t even need to mention Bakura, right? Bakura who should have also been here to fill the void of fame, but his face probably only comes out fuzzy on camera like people haunted by that girl from the Ring. So we’ll just ignore Bakura, that makes sense, I can accept that canon.

But really...it’s just Joey and Yugi at the top of the crop when there should have been room for at least 4.

So, it’s interesting that the Oricalchos in this situation is the “get me popular quick” drug that will somehow give Rex and Weevil what they need for automatic success because I see people desperately looking for this SO MUCH online. I have seen so many post “This is how I got 100000 followers in 100 days,” and it’s always the same story that isn’t so much about hard work, but more how to game a broken system until all other competitors are invisible. And then there’s the hidden factor about...luck...that really offends people although we all know that it exists.

But just remember I’m not allowed to have this opinion that luck...exists...So if anyone asks, I never said this.

And also...if Rex and Weevil had any support up until now from these kids who have been stuffing them in the trunk for over a dozen episodes, they wouldn’t have done any of this.

So talking as a jaded Millennial, I’m not gonna judge you if you take your Oricalchos, if you know what I mean. Everyone has their reasons, and no one’s too good not to ever do it, lets be real.

+++++++++++++++END OF THIS RANT, WOW, I WANT TO SAY THAT WHILE SLAPPING A WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE IN A GENTLE MANNER+++++++++++++

So I realized something. This cliff face is sort of an iconic train, but it’s the wrong train.

This is the Amtrak in the middle of Nevada/Utah, pretty sure. I know that shade of orange. I’ve done the Nevada drive a lot.

And part of the reason I’m even sleuthing into this is because as an artist I like to see where art inspiration comes from. It doesn’t just come from a void--they clearly did research and I just want to find out...how it happened.

So anyway, like I said last time, the Amtrak is in charge of the Caltrain management, although the Caltrain is not part of Amtrak. And so you get similar paint jobs--it’s just that Amtrak has blue topped cars, and the Caltrain cars are typically red. Yugioh safely did red, white and blue, which both cars do, to an extent, being American trains.

It’s possible that they decided to look up scenic trains in California and were like “this one looks neat.” This one is also named the “California Zephyr” which makes it seem super Californian but in actuality it goes from Emeryville, California to Chicago. Only problem is that Emeryville is North of Oakland, and we’re supposed to be taking the train “to the airport” when the airports are in Oakland or San Mateo. This train doesn’t go to the airport. You just drove by the airport.

This train also doesn’t go to Florida. Chicago is North, way north. This train exists to be a slow, scenic train for old tourists who want to sleep in cramped spaces or jaded millennials writing their award winning novel. It has no other purpose.

So, it doesn’t at all match anything story wise...but it looks cool. They would never take this train if the world was going to end, and Rebecca wouldn’t know it exists, but, it looks cool.

But anyway, onward to the next episode. I’ll be kind of bunking in my home for a while since my entire area basically shut down, so maybe I’ll get the next updates done earlier than usual? Maybe even catch up on my backlog? hm. Possibilities.

And if you just got here, this is all the Yugioh recaps in chrono order.

[freehawaii]

CORONAVIRUS REVEALS HOW BAD HAWAI`IʻS TOURIST PROBLEM REALLY IS

 Fodors.com - April 29, 2020 - By Laurie Lyons-Makaimoku

The past two months have shown the world just how utterly messed up it is—from inept leaders and politicians to smog-free days in Los Angeles, this virus has pulled back the curtain on the so-called wizards that make the choices that affect the lives of our planet and its people. It has revealed the greed and imbalance that has plagued us all for too long. Sadly, we probably won’t learn too much from this. China’s wet markets and the assault on wildlife will continue, white-collar workers will go back to spending hours each day commuting to do a job that can easily be done remotely, and our politicians will continue to fan the flames of bipartisanship, treating constituents like they’re one big experiment and using their lives as another way to benefit financially. For those of us in Hawaii, the global pandemic has exposed something else for our small, island state—it is utterly at the mercy of tourism and tourists, and that can no longer be the case.

Hawaii currently has the highest unemployment rate in the United States at 37%, with many still waiting to file claims because of overloaded websites and staffing shortages. That rate is usually lower than 3%, while the nation’s average unemployment is around 4.4%. Tourism accounts for approximately 20% of the state’s economy, though that number can be somewhat hard to rely on because tourism touches so many areas of the economy. It has been the largest industry in Hawaii since statehood in 1959.

In recent years, other major events, natural disasters, left huge impacts on Hawaii: the unprecedented floods in Kauai and the eruption of the Kilauea Volcano, both in 2018, had serious economic impacts on the affected communities. The past three years have made it clear that this sort of dependence on an industry that is so dramatically affected by a variety of external factors is dangerous for this state to rely upon.

Aside from the economic impact of so many of Hawaii’s people losing work because tourism gets shut down, Hawaii’s dependence on tourism has had a much more significant impact—it has emboldened the entitled to use it as their playground and quarantine getaway, with very little regard for its people.

The examples are numerous, and as much as I’d love to call out the woman who bragged on her TikTok about how empty and cheap her flight was from Boston to Honolulu, or the mommy blogger who brought her whole family to Maui during the pandemic and actively brushed off criticisms, I won’t—the internet has handled them for us.

However, I am more than happy to call out the marketing company that was dumb enough to bring their firm to Hawaii from Baltimore and actively brag about their callousness on their social media channels. Uprooted Platinum flaunted their work vacation and laughed about their private beach (though they didn’t actually have a private beach) while continuously violating quarantine restrictions. Since their brazen displays, they have taken down all of their social media pages and their website. So maybe they weren’t that great at marketing, after all.

And yet, they keep coming. One couple was arrested in Waikiki this week after flaunting their refusal to adhere to the current visitor self-quarantine all over social media, then hopping from hotel to hotel to avoid suspicion. That couple, who were from Las Vegas and Australia, were then sent home. Another couple from California was arrested in Waikiki after allegedly violating the rules for an entire week. Three others were arrested at a hotel pool in Hilo, visitors from Washington who violated quarantine. Those who are coming to Hawaii because they are homeless and want to ride things out in the tropics are being sent back to their place of origin (using funds from the Hawaii Tourism Authority).

Since Hawaii’s governor enacted mandatory 14-day quarantine restrictions on March 26, Hawaii has continued to see an average of 130 visitors per day. Compare that to this time last year when that number was 30,000 people per day and it seems like nothing, but it is still something. That means that 130 people each day have dismissed the health and well-being of Hawaii’s citizens for their own benefit and pleasure. And that is about as far away from aloha as one can get.

Maybe I should take a step back for a second because there has been a lot of information to unpack since this pandemic has started. Maybe you don’t understand why Hawaii residents don’t want visitors right now, why “Hawaii is Closed” adorns social media profiles as far as the internet can see. It’s simple, really: it’s about a lack of resources. Hawaii has 340 intensive care unit beds and 561 ventilators, the majority of which are on Oahu. On top of that, the supply lines in Hawaii are limited—we depend on air transport and a few ships each week to bring in goods; we don’t have those interstate-traveling big rigs that the rest of the U.S. can rely on. Our toilet paper and hand sanitizer shortages started at least a full week before people started hoarding in the continental U.S. We don’t have enough supplies for our own homes, much less vacation rentals full of tourists.

In addition to the lack of resources, reports of tourists waiting out the pandemic at the few resorts that remain open include awful experiences interacting with guests. One resort employee told local ABC affiliate KITV that “a guest from San Francisco used racial slurs and said hotel staff should be grateful that tourists give them jobs.” She said that guests are extending their stays, but are ignoring restrictions on where they can go. She also didn’t shy away from calling some guests “rude and abusive.”

So, you can see why Hawai‘i would prefer to be closed right now.

And try as they might, our state and local governments have not come up with a solution to keep visitors away. As a state, Hawaii has no authority to shut down federal air travel for visitors (though Oahu Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the mayors of Maui and Kauai, as well as the Hawaii Island county council, have asked the Trump administration, to no avail). They have, however, managed to shut down interisland travel, requiring all but a few types of people to enter 14-day quarantine while traveling to and amongst the islands (including residents). Visitors are required to quarantine in their hotels, while residents must stay in their homes. Before those measures were enacted, Hawaii residents took it upon themselves to send a message to tourists who tried to come during the pandemic by protesting at airports and along Honolulu’s highways.

Gradually, stronger efforts have been made. The Hawaii National Guard has been activated to help monitor checkpoints and screen visitors at the airport. The police are screening people as they try to enter certain areas, like the famed Hana Highway in Maui, ensuring that potentially sick visitors cannot access the remote parts of the island that have limited access to health care. State government is looking at limiting hotel reservations. Law enforcement is cracking down on violators. In early April, the Hawaii Convention and Visitors Bureau put out a request to 170 top publications and trade magazines, asking them to stop promoting Hawaii right now. And yet, they keep coming.

Vacation rentals have been designated as non-essential businesses in hopes of keeping visitors out, but it’s proving to be a lot easier said than done (which seems to always be the case when it comes to regulating vacation rentals). When visitors enter Hawaii, they fill out an agriculture form to help prevent unregulated plants and animals from entering. Now, these forms are being used to help track visitors and enforce the 14-day quarantine, but there are some serious flaws with that system—illegal vacation rentals have a regular address like any other home, so it’s difficult to identify them. New steps are being taken to research each individual and address, but plenty of people have fallen through the cracks already, setting up shop in Hawaiian homes (almost 70% of which are owned by people who live off-island), and skirting that 14-day quarantine.

You would think that the hotels would be easier to monitor, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Hotel employees have told local media that many hotels are doing almost nothing to enforce the quarantine, basically limiting their participation in regulation to handing guests a piece of paper with state and local rules and leaving them to it. The lack of monitoring means that the 14-day quarantine is almost useless once a person arrives, though it has clearly served as a deterrent for most people who consider traveling to Hawaii. That said, one of the high-profile quarantine violation arrests this week was due to a hotel manager calling the authorities on the California couple that flaunted quarantine for over a week. Not everyone is out to make a buck at the risk of Hawaiian lives.

At the time of publication, Hawaii’s coronavirus cases were just over 604, with 14 total deaths. On Oahu, where the majority of the cases are, Mayor Caldwell just extended the stay-at-home order to May 30, with a few relaxations of requirements. Non-essential businesses are closed. Beaches are closed for lounging (though people can swim and exercise in the ocean). Some parks are soon to reopen for exercise, but most people don’t come here to exercise in our parks. Hotels are not allowed to operate restaurants, gyms, or pools. And yet, they keep coming.

Polite requests to not come to Hawaii, or at the very least to go through the mandatory 14-day quarantine, are not being heeded. Tourism is rearing its ugly head during this pandemic. This continued deep lack of respect for a place that isn’t just a vacation stomping ground, but a place of immense cultural, historical, and spiritual significance for the people who come from there and live there makes it quite clear that Hawaii needs to significantly pull back on its reliance on tourism. And of course, these issues are far from new.

But what does that mean for Hawaii? In addition to tourism, the top industries for the state include defense, agriculture, fishing, manufacturing, and power. Strengthening the defense industry in Hawaii is not something that many Hawaii residents will advocate for, and sadly power, especially green power, has proven to be highly problematic when it comes to the concerns of Hawaii’s people. Of the remaining industries, agriculture seems to be the top choice among politicians and citizens in giving Hawaii a fighting chance in shaking off the yoke of tourism.

Hawaii imports approximately 90% of its food, a number that continues to astonish those who live here and see the bounty that these islands can produce. There are more than 200 varieties of avocado that grow in Hawaii—and we’re not talking about those little Haas ones that people love. We’re talking indulgent, buttery fruits that can grow so big that they set Guinness World Records, like this 5.6 pounder did last year. Hawaii Island alone is home to 10 of the 14 microclimates of the world, many of which are wonderful for growing a variety of foods.

This shift is currently at the top of the to-do list for many lawmakers. One citizen, new to politics, is running for Mayor of Hawaii County (on Hawaii Island) and is advocating for greater agricultural initiatives. Ikaika Marzo also happens to be a tour guide operator.

“An event like this pandemic truly shows us how much our econmy [sic] relies on tourism, and as a local tour owner and operator myself, I’m here to say that is not right, not an ideal way for a county to be structured–we are so much MORE than our in-n-out tourists who spend money here. We have many other options that could still be booming right now, right through this pandemic, and could factor into helping the rest of the mainland US which had to temporarily cut off imports from foreign countries,” Marzo wrote on a recent Facebook post, a video of him walking around a deserted downtown Hilo and stopping at the local farmer’s market (ironically, a popular tourist attraction) while discussing agriculture.

In addition to focusing on other industries, Hawaii needs to put more effort into educating visitors to ensure that its people and places are receiving the respect that they deserve. The Hawaii Tourism Authority is working on long-term, strategic plans to focus on sustainability in travel as their primary concern, including greater investments in culture and natural resources, and considering local communities and their priorities more. Some in the tourism industry are even discussing implementing more models like the one at Hanauma Bay in Oahu that requires visitors to go through a short educational orientation and watch a video before entering the nature preserve. Hopefully, these ideas will continue to be developed and implemented to help address some of these issues.

While state politicians and decision-makers can’t change an entire economy overnight, visitors who take advantage of Hawaii’s top industry can change their behaviors and their attitudes so that it’s a little bit easier of a pill to swallow for the people whose culture and history has been stripped down and repackaged for maximum consumption by folks on holiday. Visitors should never expect that they have access to go where they want to go or that they can treat people like crap, no matter where or when they travel. Visitors should treat their destination with respect and reverence for the people and places that are their hosts. Just because you can get away with something, doesn’t mean you should still do it. Just because it’s legal or allowed, doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

So, if you hope to receive some of our aloha (which doesn’t come as part of the price of admission, no matter what those beckoning ads may say), it is imperative that you come here ready to share some aloha of your own.

Hawaii has a long way to go before it can even partially extract itself from suckling so strongly at the teat of tourism, but it has never been given a better time to start than now. One thing has been made clear: though many people are suffering at the loss of their jobs, those dolphins and whales that visitors come to visit certainly don’t miss them. Marine life is flourishing as residents and visitors can no longer snorkel, scuba dive, or play amongst the reefs, and that needs to be taken very seriously by all of us, visitors and residents alike.

So come back to Hawaii, eventually. You’ll need a vacation when this is over, and many of us want to welcome you. Just don’t be too surprised if our aloha continues to wear thin if some changes aren’t made, starting with you.

[tessatechaitea]

Wonder Twins #5

Jayna just punched straight through her brother's butthole.

If you're a being who turns into water, your dick and butthole don't just disappear, right? They just become part of the water! So I'm almost certainly correct in my comment on the cover. Hopefully Mark Russell will explore this topic in a future issue. Until then, I'll be certain to tell everybody I know that Jayna basically fisted Zan. Luckily for the Wonder Twins, I don't know many people and also they are fictional characters. This issue is called "Magic and Games." I think. It will probably take me less time to read this entire comic book than it took me to puzzle out the word "Games" in the font used for the title.

Sure, you can see it now that I already told you what it was! But it was difficult before I worked it out! Although I still wouldn't be surprised to learn the title is "Magic and Galljes" or "Magic and "Gaines" and that the second word is somebody's name.

Usually I don't comment on Mark Russell comic books because to comment on a Mark Russell comic book, you should probably be smart and serious. Sure, he's having fun and writing an entertaining book that I can easily use to make jokes about fisting incest! But he also writes sensitive stories about social justice and systemic bias and ethical dilemmas in changing times and, well, other stuff that I'm too dumb to even discuss in the most general terms! He's a smart guy which is why I hate him with a burning passion! But it's a good hate! It's the kind of envious hate that pushes me to my own Emerald Twilight! I probably won't wind up destroying an entire town and ruining my reputation and becoming the most vilified hero in our universe but I almost certainly will eventually become the avenging spirit of God judging everybody around me! Wait, I think I already am that! Whatever my point is, it's that Mark Russell writes good and I'm too weak to not despise him for it. Polly Math has just won first prize at the science fair because her last name is Math. I guess Sandra Science didn't compete this year so Polly was the obvious next choice. Jayna wins second place because her project on fucking hot guys while being a nerd in high school fell apart when the guy she attempted to science fair fuck turned out to be a villain. It's also possible I'm confusing story lines but you have to expect that kind of thing! I'm not spring chicken! Remembering details between chapters that come out a full month apart has been nearly impossible for the last twenty years! I shouldn't make fun of Polly Math's name because I have a name that people always try to make jokes about too. It's not Grunion Guy! You can probably find it if you do even the smallest amount of Internet research! I'm not going to help you though because I don't want to get called a Deaf Chef anymore! Polly is upset that her father is working with Lex Luthor and the League of Annoyance. But Jayna has a plan to fix things! I bet her plan is to turn into a giant tortoise while Zan turns into an ice dildo and...wait a second! Why am I giving out good ideas that Mark Russell will just steal in a few issues?! Better to not speculate on things! Also, I mean, the cover shows Jayna going with the shark plan.

Okay fine! I'm finally interested in Fox News!

The most disturbing thing about people who watch Fox News is that they ignore five hundred other channels that are showing entertaining things on their television at the same time! Who chooses that shit over Comedy Central or the Game Show Network?! I haven't had cable for nearly twenty years and whenever I'm staying somewhere with cable, it's locked on the Game Show Network 24/7! Who the fuck chooses to watch state propaganda over old game shows?! Fucking psychopaths, that's who!

Polly Math's father wound up working with Lex Industries because only Lex Luthor hired African Americans, I guess? Hadn't he heard of STAR Labs?! Maybe Silas Stone and Sarah Charles fulfilled their quota?

I might be misreading this scene but I don't think I am because the white guys with white guys playing golf pictures behind them seem interested in Filo Math if he's Norwegian (so, you know, totally white!) and then when they meet him, they don't want to hire him. It could be that they really are concerned with his specialty! What could that be?! I mean, it can't be any worse than Silas Stone's specialty of turning his son into a cybernetic example of the castration of the black male in America! That's a really terrible specialty! Although Sarah Charles seemed to be pretty into it. See?! This is why I can't review a Mark Russell book! He's making a great point about the systemic bias inherent in corporate hiring practices and I'm not taking it seriously! I mean, he isn't either, really? He's being light-hearted while still making a good point. Which is what I've done, I think, in my comment about Cyborg's lack of a penis! The Scrambler wants to play a trick on society. He's a magician that believes people are frightened of magic and only like the part where everything is normal again. Magician: "Is this your card?" Audience Member: "Why yes! Thank God you picked my card! I was worried I was going to have to live in a world where my card wasn't picked!" Maybe I'm not comprehending his point. Anyway, The Scrambler wants to do a trick where things don't ever go back to normal! He's a monster! Imagine picking the Three of Clubs and nobody ever showing you the Three of Clubs ever again! Ugh, I'm feeling faint. To save Polly's Dad from definite prison time (or possibly, if Superman shows up, an eternity in the Phantom Zone. As if Superman can be bothered with Earth's judicial system! Pshaw!), Jan has challenged the League of Annoyance to a duel at the zoo. I guess if she wants to stress out all of the animals there with a big battle, who am I to judge? I mean other than being the real life version of Hal Jordan's Spectre, of course! At the zoo, Jayna recruits a bunch of Australian animals to help fight which goes as spectacularly as you can imagine it would. And what I mean by that is that a koala is blown to bits. But I guess that's worth it in the grand scheme of getting Polly Math's father to stop working with the League of Annoyance. It's like that philosophical conundrum about an ant that sacrifices its life for even the tiniest amount to better the world. It's just an ant! It practically owes it to the universe to die for nearly nothing! What does this koala bear expect? It should get to live in luxurious confinement at the zoo and not die for a trivial reason? Stupid koala bear. Go fuck yourself, you selfish bastard. The Wonder Twins defeat two out of three of the League of Annoyance members at the expense of just one koala's life and the bruised jaw of an innocent kangaroo. The third member, some woman with a Kryptonian cell phone whose name maybe I should remember, gets away to go regroup. Sylvia is a racist that joined the League because she didn't like the demographics of her small town changing. She's startled by Filo entering the League's headquarters to pack up his stuff and winds up zapping him like she zapped the koala. Okay, I guess the koala isn't as dead as I first thought. I should have realize a Kryptonian phone is probably sending everything to the Phantom Zone. So once again, I, the Grandmaster Comic Book Reader, was correct when I speculated that the worst that could happen to Filo was prison or the Phantom Zone! I'm the smarterest! Sylvia is caught on camera zapping Filo Math and then messes up in an interview when she kind of admits to having maybe zapped more than one black person with her phone off-camera? It's a real public relations nightmare!

But Lex can fix it! His greatest strength is turning public relations nightmares into public relations wet dreams!

Lex News turns Cell Phone Sylvia into a national hero. Because anything is excusable if you just say how scared you were! I mean, as long as you're white! It's scary being white! Sometimes you have to kill people with your legal gun while standing your own ground after confronting somebody for the most inconsequential reasons! It's just the way the world works! At least in America! Happy 4th of July! Just in case some readers weren't smart enough to get that everybody blasted by Sylvia's phone went to the Phantom Zone, Mark Russell supplies us with an image of Filo and the koala and a bunch of Sylvia's other victims (hmm, all black! But that's probably just a coincidence!) in the Phantom Zone. Polly, at the end of her rope with doing the right thing in an unjust world, decides to contact The Scrambler. I can't wait for her big magic trick to fix the world! The Scrambler's big trick to fix the world is to threaten to scramble everybody's identity. Everybody's minds will switch around so that they're now in different bodies. That means the powerful might wind up being the poorest people in the worst poverty. And the only way he won't do it is if the powerful fix the world in thirty days. Seems like a good plan! Except I'm curious to see how they fix it. Most people's ideas of fixing the world rely on the current world still existing somehow. So the fix is handicapped from the beginning by needing to be built on the ruins of the old system. To truly make a new system that works, the old system must be completely razed to the ground. But nobody has the stomach for that. So we make exceptions and compromises, building the new structure on top of a rotting foundation. It's why DC's Universe fixes always fail. They rely on making things new and better but need to remain rooted in the past. Crisis on Infinite Earths was built on a world that still contained members of Infinity Inc. who suddenly didn't fit in the world anymore. So DC then had to do Zero Hour which told new origin stories but still refused to throw out everything that came before to simply start again. Even The New 52, which people hated because they felt it did exactly what I suggested (razing the shit to the ground), didn't work because, I believe, it didn't go far enough! It still accepted Superman had died. It still accepted all of Green Lantern's past. It still contained a Batgirl who was shot by Joker and became Oracle. It was still the DC Universe but with arbitrary and subtle changes that made no real difference except the jettisoning of a ton of history. So it didn't work for anybody! Um, anyway, my initial point was that real life political structures and social dynamics and economic systems can never really be restructured in a meaningful way because they have to kowtow to older ways of thinking and doing things. The comic book stuff was just easier to write about! I'm sure Mark Russell will figure it out! Or he'll just have The Scrambler and Polly Math arrested and nothing will work out like it should and it will just be the punctuation on the idea that everything fucking sucks. Yay! Wonder Twins #5 Rating: A+. Come on! Everything Mark Russell writes gets an A+! It shows how smart I am!

[disastr-femme]

A Reason To Fight (1/?)

Summary: After Spiderman is forced to spend less time fighting local crimes, and more time fighting along the Avengers, local crime has gone up and more intense than ever. Reader decides to step in after her brother is harassed by gang activity. She isn’t Spider-Man’s biggest fan lately. Reader struggles with vigilante justice, and typical high school problems, like a crush on a classmate.

Pairing: Peter Parker x Reader, Spiderman x Reader (disagreement)

—–

“Y/N, eyes on the board please.” Ms. Warren said, returning back to the days lesson. You heard Flash snicker behind you. Rolling your eyes you turn around quickly and throw a crumbled up piece of paper at him, earning a few snickers from other classmates. You turn back around to the board and do your best to focus on the lesson. You were very tired from staying out late last night. Shane and his gang were striking up a lot of trouble last night and they still weren’t exactly taking you seriously. You kind of understood. You looked like someone playing dress up as a hero. It’s not like you had powers to back you up, except for your gymnastics skills and a bit of cleverness if you were being modest.

But you didn’t see a choice anymore. Shane wouldn’t leave your bother alone, harassing him and jumping him because he refused to join his gang. They were being more reckless than before Spiderman, but since he wasn’t around as often, there’s been a spike in petty crimes around the city. The police were busy doing god knows what, you’ve tried to report them, you tried talking to someone at the school, but nothing happened. Even after a desperate attempt to get a hold of Spiderman, you wrote him a letter explaining the problems you were having and left it at a graffiti spot with his logo down an alley. It wasn’t like you had much of a choice, he didn’t have a P.O box or anything.

Since nothing seemed to work, you refused to let anything happen to your brother so you decided to take matters into your own hands. Donning a pair of black jeans and black zip up jacket, along with a black eye mask you had left over after last years Halloween costume. Your first night you tried to do the ‘cool’ heroine thing and wear black heeled boots but just an hour in you could feel each individual blister forming on your feet. So now you just wear your black converse. You knew it was dangerous for a teenage girl to do what she was doing, but you felt like you had no other option. The only thing you carried on your person was a taser your mother insisted you have and some industrial strength zip ties you bought off Amazon… Just in case you were able to detain someone.

The bell rang out and you quickly jumped out of your seat, hurrying to the lunch room. You overslept this morning, and missed breakfast, so you were ready for lunch.

The lunch room was slowly filling up as you grabbed a tray filled with the days lunch special. Scanning the cafeteria, you saw your friend Michelle sitting at the end of a lunch table, with Peter and Ned on the other end. Peter looked just as tired as you felt, and you thought you saw a faint purple bruise on his cheekbone.

Sitting across from Michelle she gave you a head nod, but didn’t look up from the book she was reading. Deciding not to interrupt her, you took out some of your own homework to complete. You didn’t get a chance to finish the English paper that was due next period, so you focused on that.

It was easy to focus on what needed done, despite the crowded lunchroom. That is until you heard hushed whispers coming from Peter and Ned across the table. It was one of those nagging feelings you got when you could feel people talking about you.

“Do you guys need something?” You asked them sharply, and grimaced slightly at how rude you came off. “That was rude… What’s going on guys?”

A red blush creeped up Peters neck and you tried to ignore the butterflies in your stomach. He couldn’t like you,he was the smartest guy at Midtown. You were just average.

“Peter just wanted to know if you were working on that English paper?” Ned said, no so subtly trying to get Peter to catch on. They obviously weren’t talking about that.

“Uh, yeah.” You said, pushing your hair out of your eyes. “I’m just going over some basic edits and stuff.”

“Cool,” Peter practically squeaked. Why was he so cute…? “W-what did you write yours on?”

“It’s a song analysis of ‘I Did Something Bad’ by Taylor Swift. I did some research on what I could to see what might have made her write the song and stuff.” You say, taking on of your legs and tucking it underneath you, turning so you were facing the boys. “It was either that or a summary of 'Animal Farm’ and I wasn’t about to write that. One, not enough time and two I couldn’t analyze the meat industry. I’d rather eat my nuggets in piece.”

“Which is why you’re so tired all the time.” Michelle said, not looking up from her book. “You eat a bunch of meat, or a loose interpretation of it and your body doesn’t know what to do with it.”

“Michelle, we are not talking about veganism right now.” You laugh, throwing a tater tot at her. “How far are you guys on your science projects?” You ask the boys.

“About halfway done,” Ned said, his mouth full of his sandwich.

“Haven’t even started…” Peter mumbled, clearly upset with his lack of progress.

“You didn’t do any while you were out of school last week?” You asked, slightly concerned. “What were you doing?”

“I was sick.” Peter said flatly, not quite looking at you. You could tell that wasn’t the truth. It was a knack you had, knowing when people weren’t truthful when they spoke to you. You never called people out on it, because that wasn’t anyway to make friends, but you always noted when people were lying.

The warning bell rang you the four of you got up and began cleaning up your messes.

“I’m not too far on mine, if you want you can come over and we can work on our projects together?” You asked Peter hopefully. His eyes perked up at the question, bringing some light back to his tired face.

“Really?” He asked, and you nod back to him, giving him an encouraging smile. You silently tell the butterflies in your stomach to knock it off. “Yeah, that sounds good. Do you wanna start tonight? I think May is ordering Pad Thai tonight.”

“That sounds great! Five o'clock?” You ask, gathering all your school stuff and walking over to walk next to Peter to class.

“Yeah, that sounds good.” He says, smiling back to you.

“Your house, five. I’ll be there then.” You say, nudging Peters shoulder with your own. You bite your lip to keep from grinning too widely. And you hope that Shane doesn’t start anything tonight.

—–

A/N: An introductory post. I don’t plan on this series being too long. Maybe a couple posts. I just like the idea of someone liking Peter a lot, but having a strong dislike for Spiderman haha. I don’t have a writing schedule yet, just kinda when I get time. No guarantee there will be another post before Christmas tho :p

[ufcw]

The UFCW sues the federal government over dangerous line speed rule

This week, the UFCW International together with UFCW Locals 663, 440 and 2 filed a federal lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota seeking to stop the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new swine slaughter modernization rule, which eliminates the line speed limits in pork slaughter plants and reduces the number of Federal inspectors important for ensuring the safety of our food by 40%. Public Citizen Litigation Group represents the UFCW and local unions in the lawsuit. 

In a press release, UFCW International President Marc Perrone said the following: 

“Thousands of our members work hard every day in America’s pork plants to help families across the country put food on the table. Increasing pork plant line speeds is not only a reckless giveaway to giant corporations, it will put thousands of workers in harm’s way. This new rule would also dramatically weaken critical protections that Americans depend on to be able to select safe, healthy food to feed their families every day. The safety of America’s food and workers is not for sale and this lawsuit seeks to ensure this dangerous rule is set aside and these companies are held accountable.” 

What is “line speed?” 

Mark Nemitz, Assistant to Director of the UFCW’s Food Processing, Packing, & Manufacturing Division, and a former kill floor worker who knows what it’s like to be on the line firsthand, explained: 

A line is basically a chain that is up above you in the air about fifteen feet. On that are these trolleys, and the hog will hang on that and go past you. Currently, with inspectors there we’re running about eleven hundred and six hogs per hour, and if we were to increase that, it would cause them to go faster and we’d have to just hurry through. 

If we were to allow the line speeds to go up, we’re just putting more strain on workers’ bodies. More stressors. And it’s just not good. 

Along with the food safety aspect, when you go faster, you have less time that you can see a piece of meat to detect any foreign material or any imperfections in it. I used to work on the line on the kill floor myself and you say ‘well, I can’t add more people to a lot of places because we’re pretty squeezed tight,’ so you put another person in a tight spot, you have knives in your hands, you’re moving faster. The animals have gotten bigger over the years, too, so there’s more cutting. There’s just a lot to this other than ‘we’re just going to speed this up and it’s going to be fine.’ It’s going to cause a lot of issues. Many times, we’re working around 95% of our capacity anyway as it is, and increasing the speed would just make it so hard. I can only imagine being on the line today.” 

Taking legal action 

In May 2018, more than 6,500 UFCW members who work in pork plants submitted comments to the USDA in opposition to the proposed rule that would “increase the line speeds where they work, threatening both them and the consumers they serve.” But the USDA chose to ignore those concerns. 

“We have been objecting as the USDA prepared to promulgate this rule that allows companies to completely eliminate line speeds,” said Sarai King, Assistant General Counsel for the UFCW International. “In addition to line speed limitations, it also reduces the number of federal inspectors on the line by forty percent. When this rule came out, we were ready to challenge it immediately because we knew how badly it would affect our workers.” 

The UFCW represents the largest number of workers in the meatpacking industry in the country. The three local unions who joined with the UFCW International to bring the lawsuit all have major packing plants and represent a significant number of workers impacted by the rule. 

“We urged the USDA to consider how unsafe this rule would make our workplaces, but they refused,” said UFCW Local 663 President Matt Utecht in Minnesota. “We had no choice but to go to court to stop a rule that will endanger the health and livelihoods of thousands of UFCW members.” 

“We have a lot of pride in the products our members produce,” said UFCW Local 440 President Leo Kanne in Iowa. “This rule will erode the quality and safety of the food we make and feed to our own families.” 

“The USDA claims that this rule will make our food safer,” said UFCW Local 2 President Martin Rosas in Kansas. “But our members, who have worked in the industry for years, know firsthand it makes both the food they make and the plants they work in less safe. Let’s listen to the experts who work in these plants every day instead of big corporations just looking to make even more money.”  

The complaint 

“Shockingly, USDA admitted in its rule that it simply ignored the mounds of evidence that showed its actions will harm workers, while bending over backwards to help businesses. That violates basic principles of administrative law,” said Adam Pulver, an attorney with Public Citizen, which represents UFCW and the three locals in the case. 

Under the Administrative Procedure Act, federal agencies like the USDA have to provide reasons for what they do that are supported by logical evidence. In this case, in the face of overwhelming evidence that injuries increase when line speeds increase, the USDA ignored the evidence and went instead with what big companies wanted, allowing them to increase the line speeds with no limits at all. The lawsuit objects to the fact that the USDA ignored the risks to worker safety and reduced the number of federal inspectors, which means that food may not be adequately appraised or  properly inspected. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the rule against the law as “arbitrary and capricious,” which means that it was done without reasoned decision-making. It also asks the court to set aside the rule and prevent the USDA from further implementing it. 

BACKGROUND  

The USDA published a new rule for pork meat inspections which removes limits on line speeds in swine slaughter plants and turns over major meat inspection tasks from federal inspectors to meat companies. 

The UFCW represents about 250,000 workers in the meatpacking and food processing industries and 30,000 workers in pork plants. UFCW members handle 71 percent of all hogs slaughtered and processed in the United States. 

In May 2018, more than 6,500 UFCW members who work in pork plants submitted comments to the USDA in opposition to the proposed rule that would increase the line speeds where they work, threatening both them and the consumers they serve. 

All the UFCW locals who are parties in the lawsuit represent pork slaughter workers. UFCW Local 663 is based in Brooklyn Center, Minn.; UFCW Local 440 is based in Denison, Iowa; and UFCW Local 2 is based in Bel Aire, Kan. 

The Modernization of Swine Slaughter Inspection rule will hurt workers across the country. 

Hazards of Modernization of Swine Slaughter Inspection Rule:  

The Modernization of Swine Slaughter Inspection rule removes all limitations on line speeds in hog slaughter plants which will endanger the health and safety of tens of thousands of workers in the hog slaughter industry. 

Even at current line speeds, swine slaughter and processing workers face many job risks that can lead to severe injury, illness and death. 

There is no evidence that line speed increases can be done in a manner that ensures food and worker safety. 

In 1997, the USDA created a pilot program called the HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) which allowed five hog slaughter plants to test a new food safety program.  The hog slaughter pilot program revealed serious safety issues including a Clemens food plant in Pennsylvania which reported injuries severe enough that two workers were hospitalized, and one suffered an amputation. 

The Modernization of Swine Slaughter Inspection rule includes no requirement or funding to train plant employees on inspection techniques that were previously performed by USDA inspectors and are now their responsibility. 

Increased line speeds will disproportionately hurt women and people of color.  

Key Facts About Swine Workers:  

Meatpacking workers in hog slaughter plants work in cold, wet, noisy, and slippery conditions making tens of thousands of forceful repetitive motions on each shift. 

Research shows that the fast pace in pork plants, coupled with the forceful and repetitive nature of most of the jobs, leads to high rates of injuries and health issues. 

Meatpacking workers are injured at 2.4 times the rate of other industries. These injuries result in lost time or restrictions at three times the rate of other industries and they face illness rates at 17 times the rate of other industries. 

The previous maximum line speed for swine was 1,106 hogs per hour. 

    from The UFCW sues the federal government over dangerous line speed rule

[thisdaynews]

Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/agriculture-department-buries-studies-showing-dangers-of-climate-change/

Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change

President Donald Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue have both expressed skepticism about climate change and appear to have suppressed research efforts on the topic. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo

POLITICO Investigation

The Trump administration has stopped promoting government-funded research into how higher temperatures can damage crops and pose health risks.

The Trump administration has refused to publicize dozens of government-funded studies that carry warnings about the effects of climate change, defying a longstanding practice of touting such findings by the Agriculture Department’s acclaimed in-house scientists.

The studies range from a groundbreaking discovery that rice loses vitamins in a carbon-rich environment — a potentially serious health concern for the 600 million people world-wide whose diet consists mostly of rice — to a finding that climate change could exacerbate allergy seasons to a warning to farmers about the reduction in quality of grasses important for raising cattle.

Story Continued Below

All of these studies were peer-reviewed by scientists and cleared through the non-partisan Agricultural Research Service, one of the world’s leading sources of scientific information for farmers and consumers.

None of the studies were focused on the causes of global warming – an often politically charged issue. Rather, the research examined the wide-ranging effects of rising carbon dioxide, increasing temperatures and volatile weather.

The administration, researchers said, appears to be trying to limit the circulation of evidence of climate change and avoid press coverage that may raise questions about the administration’s stance on the issue.

“The intent is to try to suppress a message — in this case, the increasing danger of human-caused climate change,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “Who loses out? The people, who are already suffering the impacts of sea level rise and unprecedented super storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves.”

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who has expressed skepticism about climate science in the past and allegedly retaliated against in-house economists whose findings contradicted administration policies, declined to comment. A spokesperson for USDA said there have been no directives within the department that discouraged the dissemination of climate-related science.

“Research continues on these subjects and we promote the research once researchers are ready to announce the findings, after going through the appropriate reviews and clearances,” the spokesperson said in an email.

“USDA has several thousand scientists and over 100,000 employees who work on myriad topics and issues; not every single finding or piece of work solicits a government press release,” the spokesperson added.

However, a POLITICO investigation revealed a persistent pattern in which the Trump administration refused to draw attention to findings that show the potential dangers and consequences of climate change, covering dozens of separate studies. The administration’s moves flout decades of department practice of promoting its research in the spirit of educating farmers and consumers around the world, according to an analysis of USDA communications under previous administrations.

The lack of promotion means research from scores of government scientists receives less public attention. Climate-related studies are still being published without fanfare in scientific journals, but they can be very difficult to find. The USDA doesn’t post all its studies in one place.

Since Trump took office in January 2017, the Agricultural Research Service has issued releases for just two climate-related studies, both of which had findings that were favorable to the politically powerful meat industry. One found that beef production makes a relatively small contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and another that removing animal products from the diet for environmental reasons would likely cause widespread nutritional problems. The agency issued a third press release about soy processing that briefly mentioned greenhouse gas emissions, noting that reducing fossil fuel use or emissions was “a personal consideration” for farmers.

By contrast, POLITICO found that in the case of the groundbreaking rice study USDA officials not only withheld their own prepared release, but actively sought to prevent dissemination of the findings by the agency’s research partners.

Researchers at the University of Washington had collaborated with scientists at USDA, as well as others in Japan, China and Australia, for more than two years to study how rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect rice — humanity’s most important crop. They found that it not only loses protein and minerals, but is also likely to lose key vitamins as plants adapt to a changing environment.

The study had undergone intensive review, addressing questions from academic peers and within USDA itself. But after having prepared an announcement of the findings, the department abruptly decided not to publicize the study and urged the University of Washington to hold back its own release on the findings, which two of their researchers had co-authored.

In an email to staffers dated May 7, 2018, an incredulous Jeff Hodson, a UW communications director, advised his colleagues that the USDA communications office was “adamant that there was not enough data to be able to say what the paper is saying, and that others may question the science.”

“It was so unusual to have an agency basically say: ‘Don’t do a press release,’ ” Hodson recalled in an interview. “We stand for spreading the word about the science we do, especially when it has a potential impact on millions and millions of people.”

Researchers say the failure to publicize their work damages the credibility of the Agriculture Department and represents an unwarranted political intrusion into science.

“Why the hell is the U.S., which is ostensibly the leader in science research, ignoring this?” said one USDA scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid the possibility of retaliation. “It’s not like we’re working on something that’s esoteric … we’re working on something that has dire consequences for the entire planet.”

“You can only postpone reality for so long,” the researcher added.

* * *

With a budget of just over $1 billion, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service — known as ARS — is often referred to as “one of the best kept secrets” in the sprawling the department because of its outsized impact on society. The agency has pioneered a variety of major breakthroughs, from figuring out how to mass produce penicillin so it could be widely used during World War II to coming up with creative ways to keep sliced apples from browning, and has for decades been at the forefront of understanding how a changing climate will affect agriculture.

The agency has stringent guidelines to prevent political meddling in research projects themselves. The Trump administration, researchers say, is not directly censoring scientific findings or black-balling researchon climate change. Instead, they say, officials are essentially choosing to ignore or downplay findings that don’t line up with the administration’s agenda.

Some scientists see the fact that the administration has targeted another research arm of USDA, the Economic Research Service, as a warning shot. Perdue is moving ERS out of Washington, which some economists see as retribution for issuing reports that countered the administration’s agenda, as POLITICO recently reported.

“There’s a sense that you should watch what you say,” said Ricardo Salvador, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s going to result in some pretty big gaps in practical knowledge. … it will take years to undo the damage.”

Among the ARS studies that did not receive publicity from the Agriculture Department are:

A 2017 finding that climate change was likely to increase agricultural pollution and nutrient runoff in the Lower Mississippi River Delta, but that certain conservation practices, including not tilling soil and planting cover crops, would help farmers more than compensate and bring down pollutant loads regardless of the impacts of climate change.

A January 2018 finding that the Southern Plains — the agriculture-rich region that stretches from Kansas to Texas — is increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, from the crops that rely on the waning Ogallala aquifer to the cattle that graze the grasslands.

An April 2018 finding that elevated CO2 levels lead to “substantial and persistent” declines in the quality of prairie certain grasses that are important for raising cattle. The protein content in the grass drops as photosynthesis kicks into high gear due to more carbon in the atmosphere — a trend that could pose health problems for the animals and cost ranchers money.

A July 2018 finding that coffee, which is already being affected by climate change, can potentially help scientists figure out how to evaluate and respond to the complex interactions between plants, pests and a changing environment. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere is projected to alter pest biology, such as by making weeds proliferate or temperatures more hospitable to damaging insects.

An October 2018 finding in conjunction with the USDA Forest Service that climate change would likely lead to more runoff in the Chesapeake Bay watershed during certain seasons.

A March 2019 finding that increased temperature swings might already be boosting pollen to the point that it’s contributing to longer and more intense allergy seasons across the northern hemisphere. “This study, done across multiple continents, highlights an important link between ongoing global warming and public health—one that could be exacerbated as temperatures continue to increase,” the researchers wrote.

Those were among at least 45 ARS studies related to climate change since the beginning of the Trump administration that did not receive any promotion, according to POLITICO’s review. The total number of studies that have published on climate-related issues is likely to be larger, because ARS studies appear across a broad range of narrowly focused journals and can be difficult to locate.

Five days after POLITICO presented its findings to the department and asked for a response, ARS issued a press release on wheat genetics that used the term “climate change.” It marked the third time the agency had used the term in a press release touting scientific findings in two and a half years.

While spokespeople say Perdue, the former Georgia governor who has been agriculture secretary since April 2017, has not interfered with ARS or the dissemination of its studies, the secretary has recently suggested that he’s at times been frustrated with USDA research.

“We know that research, some has been found in the past to not have been adequately peer-reviewed in a way that created wrong information, and we’re very serious when we say we’re fact-based, data-driven decision makers,” he said in April, responding to a question from POLITICO. “That relies on sound, replicable science rather than opinion. What I see unfortunately happening many times is that we tried to make policy decisions based on political science rather than on sound science.”

President Donald Trump, for his part, has been clear about his views on climate science and agricultural research generally: He doesn’t think much of either.

In each of his budgets, Trump has proposed deep cuts to agricultural research, requests that ignore a broad, bipartisan coalition urging more funding for such science as China and other competitors accelerate their spending. Congress has so far kept funding mostly flat.

The president has also repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus on climate change. After the government released its latest national climate assessment in November, a sweeping document based on science, Trump bluntly told reporters: “I don’t believe it.”

Officials at USDA apparently took the hint and the department did not promote the report, despite the fact that it was drafted in part by its own scientists and included serious warnings about how a changing climate poses a threat to farmers and ranchers across the country.

* * *

The USDA’s failure to publicize climate-related research does more than just quell media coverage: It can also prompt universities, fearful of antagonizing a potential source of funding, to reconsider their own plans to publicize studies.

The saga of the rice study last spring shows how a snub from USDA can create spillover effects throughout the academic world.

Emails obtained by POLITICO from one of the study’s co-authors show that ARS communications staff actually wrote a release on the study, but then decided not to send it out. The Agriculture Department and UW in Seattle had initially planned to coordinate their releases, which would both be included in a press packet prepared by the journal Science Advances, which published the study in May.

The journal had anticipated there would be significant media interest in the paper. Several earlier studies had already shown that rice loses protein, zinc and iron under the elevated CO2 levels that scientists predict for later this century, raising potentially serious concerns for hundreds of millions of people who are highly dependent on rice and already at risk of food insecurity. This latest study by ARS and its academic partners around the world had confirmed those previous findings and — for the first time — found that vitamins can also drop out of rice in these conditions.

Several days before the paper was slated to be published, Hodson, the UW communications official, sent ARS communications staff a draft of the press release the university was planning to send out. ARS officials returned the favor, sending UW their own draft press release. The headline on USDA’s draft was clear: “Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Can Reduce Vitamin Content in Rice,” though the body of the release did not mention the word “climate.”

All seemed to be on track for the rollout. A few days later, however, Hodson got a phone call from an ARS communications staffer. She told him that the agency had decided not to issue a press release after all and suggested UW reconsider its plans, noting that senior leaders at ARS now had serious concerns about the paper, according to the emails.

The staffer explained that officials were “adamant that there was not enough data to be able to say what the paper is saying, and that others may question the science,” Hodson wrote in his email to his colleagues shortly after the call.

Having the Agriculture Department question data just days before its publication struck many of the co-authors as inappropriate. The paper had already gone through a technical and policy review within ARS, both of which are standard procedure, and it had gone through a stringent peer-review process.

Kristie Ebi, one of the co-authors from UW, replied to Hodson: “Interesting — USDA is really trying to keep the press release from coming out.”

Nonetheless, senior leaders at UW took USDA’s concerns about the paper seriously, Hodson said. (It also wasn’t lost on anyone, he said, that other parts of the university receive substantial grant funding from the Agriculture Department.) The university conducted an internal review and determined that the science was sound. It went ahead with its press release.

The USDA’s attempt to quash the release had ripple effects as far as Nebraska. After catching wind of USDA’s call to the University of Washington, Bryan College of Health Sciences, in Lincoln, Neb., delayed and ultimately shortened its own release to avoid potentially offending the Agriculture Department.

“I’m disappointed,” said Irakli Loladze, a mathematical biologist at Bryan who co-authored the rice paper. “I do not even work at the USDA, but a potential call from the government agency was enough of a threat for my school to skip participating in the press-package arranged by the journal. Instead, our college issued a local and abbreviated release.”

A spokesperson for Bryan College said that the institution supports Loladze’s work and noted that the college ultimately issued its own press release and covered the study in its own publications.

“There was no omission or intentional delay based on what others were saying or doing,” the spokesperson said.

Despite the efforts of the Agriculture Department, the rice paper attracted substantial international press coverage, largely because many of the outside institutions that collaborated on the study, including the University of Tokyo, promoted it.

Kazuhiko Kobayashi, an agricultural scientist at the University of Tokyo and co-author on the paper, said he couldn’t understand why the U.S. government wouldn’t publicize such findings.

“It’s not necessarily bad for USDA,” he saidin an interview.“Actually, it’s kind of neutral.”

“In Japan we have an expression:sontaku,” he said, offering his own speculation about the political dynamic in the United States. “It means that you don’t want to stimulate your boss … you feel you cannot predict your boss’s reaction.”

A USDA spokesperson said the decision to spike the press release on the rice study was driven by a scientific disagreement, not by the fact that it was climate-related.

“The concern was about nutritional claims, not anything relating to climate change or C02 levels,” the spokesperson said in an email. “The nutrition program leaders at ARS disagreed with the implication in the paper that 600 million people are at risk of vitamin deficiency. They felt that the data do not support this.”

The spokesperson said no political appointees were involved in the decision.

Authors of the rice study strongly disagreed with the concerns USDA raised about their paper. In an email leading up to publication, Loladze, the Bryan College researcher, accused the department of essentially “cherry picking” data to raise issues that weren’t scientifically valid, according to the emails.

* * *

When the Agriculture Departmentchooses to promote a study, the impact can be significant, particularly for the agriculture-focused news outlets that are widely read by farmers and ranchers.

Earlier this year, when the agency decided to issue its release about the study finding that producing beef — often criticized for having an outsized carbon and water footprint — actually makes up a very small fraction of greenhouse gas emissions, the agricultural trade press cranked out several stories, much to the delight of the beef industry. The study had also been supported by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

The USDA’s efforts to hide climate work aren’t limited to ARS. A review of department press releases, blog posts and social media shows a clear pattern of avoiding the topic. These platforms largely eschew the term “climate change” and also steer clear of climate-related terms. Even the word “climate” itself appears to have now fallen out of favor, along with phrases like carbon, greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation and sequestration.

In April, for example, USDA sent out a press release noting that USDA officials had signed on to a communique on the sidelines of a G-20 agricultural scientists’ meeting that reaffirmed their commitment to “science-based decision making.” The release made no mention of the fact that most of the principles USDA had agreed to were actually related to “climate-smart” agriculture.

Scott Hutchins, USDA’s deputy undersecretary for research, education and economics, told POLITICO at the time that he emphasized science-based decision-making in the release — not climate — because that was the strength the participants brought to these international dialogues. He added that there was “no intent whatsoever” to avoid including the words “climate smart” in the release.

A spokesperson for USDA said that department leadership “has not discouraged ARS or any USDA agency from using terms such as climate change, climate, or carbon sequestration, or from highlighting work on these topics.”

But David Festa, senior vice president of ecosystems at the Environmental Defense Fund, which works with farmers and ranchers on climate mitigation, said tensions within the USDA over climate issues are preventing a more robust discussion of the effects of climate change on American agriculture.

“USDA really could and should be leading… and they’re not,” Festa said.

Aaron Lehman, an Iowa farmer whose operation is roughly half conventional, half organic grain, said farmers are simply not getting much information from USDA related to how to adapt to or mitigate climate change.

“My farmers tell me this is frustrating,” said Lehman, who serves as Iowa Farmers Union President.

The gap in the conversation is particularly pronounced right now, he said, as an unprecedented percentage of growers across the Midwest have had difficulty planting their crops because fields are either too wet or flooded— an extreme weather scenario that’s been disastrous for agriculture this year.

“Farmers have a sense that the volatility is getting worse,” he said.

“You get the sense that it’s very sensitive,” Lehman said of the current dynamic around climate science at USDA. “But if you can’t have an open conversation about it, if you feel like you’re being shunned, how are we going to make progress?”

* * *

Even during the George W. Bush administration, when climate change was first deemed a “sensitive” topic within ARS — a designation that means science and other documents related to it require an extra layer of managerial clearance — the department still routinely highlighted climate-related research for the public.

In the first three years of the Bush’s second term, for example, USDA promoted research on how farmers can change their tilling practices to reduce carbon being released into the atmosphere, a look at how various farm practices help capture carbon into soil, and a forecast on how rising CO2 levels would likely affect key crops. The communications office highlighted work showing that using switchgrass as a biofuel in lieu of ethanol could store more carbon in soil, which would not only mitigate greenhouse gas emissions but also boost soil health. There was also a release on a study simulating how climate change would pose challenges to groundwater.

Under Bush,the department publicly launched a five-year project on “Climate Friendly Farming” and touted a sweeping initiative aimed at better understanding and reducing agriculture’s greenhouse emissions.

“Even a small increase in the amount of carbon stored per acre of farmland would have a large effect on offsetting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions,” an ARS release noted in 2005.

Jim Connaughton, who served as chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and director of the White House Office of Environmental Policy during the Bush administration, said he was encouraged that USDA and other agencies have so far been able to continue conducting climate science even as the issue has become more politically sensitive within the current administration. However, he noted it was “really unusual” for research agencies to systematically hold back scientific communication.

During the Bush era, he said, “The agencies were unfettered in their own decisions about publicizing their own science.”

“The tone from the top matters,” he added. “The political appointees are taking signals about their own communication products.”

During the Obama years, USDA became increasingly outspoken about climate change and the need to involve agriculture, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation.

The department came up with sweeping action plans on climate change and climate science and highlighted its work on a number of different platforms, including press releases, blog posts and social media blasts. In 2014, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also launched Climate Hubs in 10 regions across the country aimed at helping farmers and ranchers cope with an increasingly unpredictable climate.

“We were trying to take science and make it real and actionable for farmers,” said Robert Bonnie, who served as undersecretary for natural resources and the environment at USDA during the Obama administration. “If you’re taking a certain block of research and not communicating it, it defeats the purpose of why USDA does the research in the first place.”

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[conners-clinic]

Rife Technology Destroys Microbes

Rife ignored the debate, preferring to concentrate on refining his method of destroying these tiny killer viruses. He used the same principle to kill them, which made them visible: resonance. By increasing the intensity of a frequency which resonated naturally with these microbes, Rife increased their natural oscillations until they distorted and disintegrated from structural stresses. Rife called this frequency the mortal oscillatory rate, or MOR, and it did no harm whatsoever to the surrounding tissues.

This principle can be illustrated by using an intense musical note to shatter a wine glass: the molecules of the glass are already oscillating at some harmonic (multiple) of that musical note; they are in resonance with it, vibrate, and can no longer remain in configuration. Because everything else has a different resonant frequency, nothing but the glass’s molecular configuration is destroyed. There are literally hundreds of trillions of different resonant frequencies, and every species and molecule has its very own.

Testing Rife’s Treatment

It took Rife many years, working 48 hours at a time, until he discovered the frequencies which specifically destroyed herpes, polio, spinal meningitis, tetanus, influenza, and an immense number of other dangerous disease organisms. In 1934, the University of Southern California appointed a Special Medical Research Committee to bring terminal cancer patients from Pasadena County Hospital to Rife’s San Diego Laboratory and clinic for treatment. The team included doctors and pathologists assigned to examine the patients – if still alive – in 90 days. This was obviously a different age! I don’t believe I’ll be seeing the University of Minnesota bringing any patients my way anytime soon. Remember, 1934 was PRE-big-money-chemo!

After the 90 days of treatment, the Committee concluded that 86.5% of the patients had been completely cured. The treatment was then adjusted and the remaining 13.5% of the patients also responded within the next four weeks. The total recovery rate using Rife’s technology was 100%. On November 20, 1934, forty-four of the nation’s most respected medical authorities honored Royal Rife with a banquet billed as The End To All Diseases at the Pasadena estate of Dr. Milbank Johnson.

But by 1939, almost all of these distinguished doctors and scientists were denying that they had ever met Rife. What happened to make so many brilliant men have complete memory lapses? It seems that news of Rife’s miracles with terminal patients had reached other ears. Remember our hypothetical question at the beginning of this report: What would happen if you discovered a cure for everything? You are now about to find out…

The Beginning of Rife’s Downfall

At first, a token attempt was made to buy-out Rife. Morris Fishbein, who had acquired the entire stock of the American Medical Association by 1934, sent an attorney to Rife with an offer you can’t refuse. Rife refused. We may never know the exact terms of this offer, but we do know the terms of the offer Fishbein made to Harry Hoxsey for control of his herbal cancer remedy. Fishbein’s associates would receive all profits for nine years and Hoxey would receive nothing. Then, if they were satisfied that it worked, Hoxsey would begin to receive 10% of the profits. Hoxsey decided that he would rather continue to make all the profits himself. When Hoxsey turned Fishbein down, Fishbein used his immensely powerful political connections to have Hoxsey arrested 125 times in a period of 16 months. The charges (based on practicing without a license) were always thrown out of court, but the harassment drove Hoxsey insane.

Fishbein must have realized that this strategy would backfire with Rife. First, Rife could not be arrested like Hoxsey for practicing without a license since he had a license. A trial on trumped-up charges would mean that prominent medical authorities working with Rife would introduce testimony supporting Rife, and the defense would undoubtedly take the opportunity to introduce evidence such as the 1934 medical study done with USC. The last thing in the world that the pharmaceutical industry wanted was a public trial about a painless therapy that cured 100% of the terminal cancer patients and cost nothing to use but a little electricity. It might give people the idea that they didn’t need drugs and though the drug industry was in its infancy in 1934, it was becoming a very naughty teenager by 1939.

In 1939, a mysterious lawsuit against Beam Ray Corporation, the only company manufacturing Rife’s frequency instruments (Rife was not a partner) tied the company up in court and legal expenses in the middle of the Great Depression bankrupted the company. Fishbein and the AMA had won; commercial production of Rife’s frequency instruments ceased completely.

On the other hand, big money was spent ensuring that doctors who had seen Rife’s therapy would forget what they saw. Almost no price was too much to suppress it. Remember that, today, treatment of a single cancer patient averages over $300,000. It’s BIG business.

Thus, Arthur Kendall, the Director of the Northwestern School of Medicine who worked with Rife on the cancer virus, accepted almost a quarter of a million dollars to suddenly retire in Mexico. That was an exorbitant amount of money in the Depression. Dr. George Dock, another prominent figure who collaborated with Rife, was silenced with an enormous grant, along with the highest honors the AMA could bestow. Between the carrots and the sticks, everyone except Dr. Couche and Dr. Milbank Johnson gave up Rife’s work and went back to prescribing drugs.

To finish the job, the medical journals, supported almost entirely by drug company revenues and controlled by the AMA, refused to publish any paper by anyone on Rife’s therapy. Therefore, an entire generation of medical students graduated into practice without ever once hearing of Rife’s breakthroughs in medicine. The magnitude of such an insane crime eclipses every mass murder in history. Cancer picks us off quietly…but by 1960 the casualties from this tiny virus exceeded the carnage of all the wars America ever fought. In 1989, it was estimated that 40% of us will experience cancer at some time in our lives.

After Rife’s Downfall

In Rife’s lifetime, he had witnessed the progress of civilization from horse-and-buggy travel to jet planes. In that same time, he saw the epidemic of cancer increase from 1 in 24 Americans in 1905 to, partially because his work was squashed, 1 in 2.5 today.

He also witnessed the phenomenal growth of the American Cancer Society, the Salk Foundation, and many others collecting hundreds of millions of dollars for diseases that were cured long before in his own San Diego laboratories. In one period, 176,500 cancer drugs were submitted for approval. Any that showed favorable results in only one-sixth of one percent of the cases being studied could be licensed. Some of these drugs had a mortality rate of 14-17%. When death came from the drug, not the cancer, the case was recorded as a complete or partial remission because the patient didn’t actually die from the cancer. It’s just absurd!!! In reality, it was a race to see which would kill the patient first: the drug or the disease.

The inevitable conclusion reached by Rife was that his life-long labor and discoveries had not only been ignored but probably would be buried with him. At that point, he ceased to produce much of anything and spent the last third of his life seeking oblivion in alcohol. It dulled the pain and his acute awareness of half a century of wasted effort – ignored – while the unnecessary suffering of millions continued so that a vested few might profit. And profit they did, and profit they do.

Rife’s Technology Lives On

Fortunately, his death was not the end of his electronic therapy. A few humanitarian doctors and engineers reconstructed his frequency instruments and kept his genius alive. Rife technology became public knowledge again in 1986 with the publication of The Cancer Cure That Worked, by Barry Lynes, and other material about Royal Rife and his monumental work.

There is wide variation in the cost, design, and quality of the modern portable Rife frequency research instruments available. Costs vary from about $3600 to $26,000 with price being no legitimate indicator of the technical competence in the design of the instrument or performance of the instrument. Some of the most expensive units have serious technical limitations and are essentially a waste of money. At the other extreme, some researchers do get crude results from inexpensive simple, unmodified frequency generators, but this is just as misguided as spending too much money. Without the proper modifications, the basic frequency generator gives only minimal and inconsistent results. Rife’s work was always with LIGHT FREQUENCY. A REAL Rife unit must use a Tesla bulb.

Other theories abound on exactly why and how Rife technology works. Dr. Robert O. Becker, MD, in his book, The Body Electric, published by Harper in 1985, gives an exciting report in chapter 15 regarding the fact that photons in light act as an electron donor to tissue cells which stimulates mitochondrial function, raises tissue pH, and increases healing.

One day, the name of Royal Raymond Rife may ascend to its rightful place as the giant of modern medical science. Until that time, his fabulous technology remains available only to the people who have the interest to seek it out. While perfectly legal for veterinarians to use to save the lives of animals, Rife’s brilliant frequency therapy remains taboo to orthodox mainstream medicine because of the continuing threat it poses to the international pharmaceutical medical monopoly that controls the lives – and deaths – of the vast majority of the people on this planet.

Research and Studies on Rife Technology

Recent studies on Rife’s work have been published in peer-reviewed medical journals. The Journal of Exp Clinical Cancer Research 2009 Apr 14;28:51, published a paper titled, Amplitude-modulated electromagnetic fields for the treatment of cancer: discovery of tumor-specific frequencies and assessment of a novel therapeutic approach. The paper revealed, “CONCLUSION: Cancer-related frequencies appear to be tumor-specific and treatment with tumor-specific frequencies is feasible, well tolerated and may have biological efficacy in patients with advanced cancer.”

Their results were remarkable: “RESULTS: We examined a total of 163 patients with a diagnosis of cancer and identified a total of 1524 frequencies ranging from 0.1 Hz to 114 kHz. Most frequencies (57-92%) were specific for a single tumor type. Compassionate treatment with tumor-specific frequencies was offered to 28 patients. Three patients experienced grade 1 fatigue during or immediately after treatment. There were no NCI grade 2, 3 or 4 toxicities. Thirteen patients were evaluable for response. One patient with hormone-refractory breast cancer metastatic to the adrenal gland and bones had a complete response lasting 11 months. One patient with hormone-refractory breast cancer metastatic to liver and bones had a partial response lasting 13.5 months. Four patients had stable disease lasting for +34.1 months (thyroid cancer metastatic to lung), 5.1 months (non-small cell lung cancer), 4.1 months (pancreatic cancer metastatic to liver) and 4.0 months (leiomyosarcoma metastatic to liver).”

Many more articles are coming out on what is now being termed Energy Medicine or Biofield Therapies.  Here is a list of a few:

Cancer Journal 2006 Sep-Oct;12(5):425-31. Complementary medicine in palliative care and cancer symptom management.

J Holist Nurs. 2011 Dec;29(4):270-8. doi: 10.1177/0898010111412186. Epub 2011 Aug 8.

Prim Care. 2010 Mar;37(1):165-79. Biofield therapies: energy medicine and primary care.

Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2009 Aug;1172:297-311. Bioelectromagnetic and subtle energy medicine: the interface between mind and matter.

J Altern Complement Med. 2009 Aug;15(8):819-26.  An HMO-based prospective pilot study of energy medicine for chronic headaches: whole-person outcomes point to the need for new instrumentation.

Integr Med Insights. 2009;4:13-20. Epub 2009 Oct 19. Integral healthcare: the benefits and challenges of integrating complementary and alternative medicine with a conventional healthcare practice

Altern Ther Health Med. 2008 Jan-Feb;14(1):44-54.  Six pillars of energy medicine: clinical strengths of a complementary paradigm.

Explore (NY). 2006 Nov-Dec;2(6):509-14.  World hypotheses and the evolution of integrative medicine: combining categorical diagnoses and cause-effect interventions with whole systems research and nonvisualizable (seemingly “impossible”) healing.

Biomed Sci Instrum. 2006;42:428-33. Localized pulsed magnetic fields for tendonitis therapy.

This was an excerpt from Dr Conners’ book, Stop Fighting Cancer and Start Treating the Cause.

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