Always Check Your Surroundings Before Forcing Your Friends To Chat With The Akuma DJ.

The Electronic Intifada

There is no such thing as childhood in Gaza

Israeli attacks expose Palestinian children to daily horrors.

Children in Gaza can tell an F-16 from an F-35 from a drone. They know a whole litany of things that are beyond their years. Things that they shouldn’t have to know. Over 10,000 children have been killed in Gaza. The children who have survived have seen their families, friends and neighbors killed by the Israeli army. They have seen near-death by starvation and death by suffocation, under the rubble and by explosion. Children in Gaza do not have the luxury of death being a mystery. It is a daily presence. If a child in Gaza is hungry, they know not to throw a tantrum. They have become used to feeling hunger. The same is true of the cold. Every child in Gaza now knows what it is to be unhoused, to sleep in a tent or on the streets in winter.

Tom Holland does Rihanna’s “Umbrella” on Lip Sync Battle

Terry Crews came out and admitted he had been sexually assulted by someone in the film industry, and is now being blacklisted. I have been a fan of his since Idiocracy, and will continue to support all of his work.

So when you wonder why people don’t come forward with their assults, this is why.

honor the request

Can I just say, your beliefs on neopagans are a breath of fresh air compared to what one of my friends believe, namely that all Neopagans are white supremacists or some other such nonsense. I don’t personally believe in Neopaganism but my brother-in-law is one and is one of the friendliest guys around, so it always frustrates me when my friend says shit like that.

Unfortunately, Nazis have co-opted Norse myth since their inception. The "Black Sun" icon is composed of a wheel of SS marks. But they're not actually S.

It's actually the rune called Sowilo. It's where the "Sig" rune comes from and Sig eventually became Sieg, which is the first half of the Nazi chant. Translated it means "hail victory".

Unfortunately this has tainted a lot of Norse myths and concepts.

I don't think neopagans are bad people inherently. There is, unfortunately, a small percentage of neopagans (particularly Odinists) that are white supremacists explicitly because of the Nazi's appropriation of Norse myth.

But, on the whole, the entire religion should be separated from the Nazi stigma. The Hindus, Buddhists, etc, aren't demonized (or shouldn't be) for their use of the swastika and Norse neopagans shouldn't be demonized for using icons like Mjolnir or the Valknut.

Watching ep1 of TFATWS (because I'm a masochist) and I swear when Raynor and Bucky are discussing the amends and she says "So, you did it all right, but it didn’t help with the nightmares" I can't help but facepalm myself so hard.

Of course it doesn't help with the nightmares you doofus, it's making them worse.

First you tell Bucky he has to make amends, basically telling him he's responsible for the WS murders and aggravating his guilt. Then you make him go after corrupt people who have achieved some form of power thanks to Hydra and you make him approach them, face them, tell them his name and if that wasn't bad enough he has to reassure them that he's no longer the Winter Soldier and "they're part of his efforts to make amends".

I'm going to say this again: you're making him tell these people who benefited from Hydra and abused the power Hydra gave them that he's no longer the WS and he's just trying to be good this time.

Basically he's reliving his trauma, he's reassured everything he did was his fault, you're not addressing his mental state at all and you just want him to follow 3 stupid steps so he can prove to be the little obedient soldier you want him to be. And fuck his mental health, I guess.

I'm sure many people have talked about this already but I needed to vent. I swear that line gets on my damn nerves.

Euromaidan Press

Top-10 Russian genocidal quotes about Ukraine

Vladimir Putin and Russian officials have left no room for ambiguity: they openly aim to erase Ukrainians as…

High-profile Russians have left no doubt in anybody's mind that they are intent on committing genocide in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin and his ethno-nationalist minions are intent on wiping out the concept of Ukraine as a country. That is what genocide is about as defined Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Vladimir Putin, along with other Russian officials and state-controlled media, openly declare their objective: the obliteration of the Ukrainian nation. The machinery of Russian state propaganda promotes a genocidal mindset towards Ukrainians among Russian soldiers today.  In Ukraine’s occupied territories, Russian forces are fulfilling their pledges through a series of atrocities, exemplified by the unearthing of mass graves and torture facilities in liberated cities such as Bucha and Izium.

You can see all ten quotes in the main link at the top of this post. But this is one that is particularly odious.

“[Ukrainian children] should have been drowned in the Tysyna [river], right there, where the duckling swims. Just drown those children, drown them right in Tysyna [river]… Whoever says that Russia occupied them, you throw them in the river with a strong undercurrent… Shove them right into those huts and burn them up… [Ukraine] is not supposed to exist at all,” Anton Krasovskyi, former Director of Broadcasting of Russia’s state-funded RT, said on 23 October 2022.

Putin and Company are basically Hamas-on-the-Volga. And we shouldn't be distracted by events elsewhere from the genocidal activities of Putin's Russia.

The Russian military’s aggression against Ukraine has resulted in numerous documented war crimes, as confirmed by international organizations, human rights NGOs, and Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office. The International Criminal Court (ICC) initiated an investigation into the situation in Ukraine on 2 March 2022, encompassing potential war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Furthermore, on 17 March 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, on suspicion of a specific war crime: the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children from the occupied territories to Russia during the invasion.

Yep, Putin is a wanted war criminal. Despite that, there is a Putin Caucus in the US House of Representatives encouraged by Putin vassal Donald Trump.

If you are in the US, contact your representatives in the US House and urge them to make aid to Ukraine a priority. Any House member of either party is worth a message – though you may wish to skip any Republican with a grade below a C on this list.

For contact information and to find out exactly who represents your district, check out this site. Have your ZIP+4 ready.

Find Your Representative | house.gov

If your rep has been supportive in the past, a quick thank you is appreciated as well as good manners.

Support for democracy at home and democracy abroad are linked. People who are 2020 election deniers are almost always Putin apologists.

Thoughts and info on TTB!Optimus Prime as I’m putting together the plot in a master copy; 

- Omar Parvez (Optimus Prime/Orion Pax) actually trained under Sedgewick Princeton, Police Commisioner of London, known fondly as ’Ol’ Sentinel’ (due to their decorated service and high number of arrests) and was something of an apprentice to him. The reason Omar was assigned to patrol the Dead End and its surrounding precinct was because two previous Chief Superintendents had resigned from the post due to their inability to turn it around, as well as the stress that took on them, and Sedgewick positioned it as a trial by fire for Omar to prove he had what it took to work directly in Scotland Yard as Deputy Commissioner.

Omar took up the challenge, but quickly realized after the first two weeks of struggling to adapt standard policing tactics to the area that what he learned in the academy wasn’t going to work here, which is when he decided to try and and solve the issue holistically/win the trust of the locals instead of fighting them; He gets Ronan Chase/Ratchet to establish a free clinic, funds a small public library which doubles as a secondary education centre due to school closures in the area (He lives/sleeps in a second floor office here, because trying to do good means actual sacrifices to time and money, and he’s ok with that), oversees the creation of community gardens to support local food banks struggling with food shortage, builds genuine rapport with locals and studies extensively about the housing crisis/liaisons with activists involved with the cause to finds solutions for the issue for the people of his jurisdiction. (A long time ago, he promised a kid—-a young Morgan Trayton/Megatron— on the other side of the fence that he wanted to be a cop to make the world a better place for everyone, and he hasn’t forgotten that kid or that promise)

Now, crime slowly but steadily goes down as kids have safe places to be, people are fed and housing initiatives are put into place, but what he’s doing is seen as out of his scope of duty (You sure you a cop?) and more importantly to the higher ups, he isn’t making the arrest quotas which means private cells aren’t being filled and less bodies are available for prison labour, which Sedgewick isn’t happy about.

“Boy, you know I like you, but the system works for a reason and you work for the system.”

They get into their first argument as mentor-apprentice when Sedgewick lets it slip that while he’s proud of the fact that Omar had managed to ‘tame’ the Dead End to some extent, the whole idea was to drive out/cage the undesirables and THEN develop the place, not fix it first and let undesirables leech off the goods when there’s big buyers out there looking for the first time to invest in property within this shithole.

You turned it around! That’s great! Now get with the rest of the program!

The cracks solidify when Omar shoots back that he was assigned to this district—not a system—-and he’s going to serve this district and its people, all of them regardless of class, until someone can prove wrongdoing on his behalf in any form, and if that means giving up on that promotion to Scotland Yard next to his mentor, so be it. 

Sedgewick can’t find any, Ronan/the local activists serve him a whole helping of loopholes to cover the initiatives they’d put into place, and this is the reason why Optimus Prime and Sentinel Prime don’t get along in this universe, and  why Sentinel is all too happy to throw Optimus under the bus when he gains the ire of the Senate and fires him the moment a chance presents itself.

“So much wasted potential.”

Equating fascism to communism/socialism. Tell us you are a centrist without telling you are a centrist.

I know you might have trouble with this, but socialism is not Marxist in nature. Marxism is socialist in nature.

This means that other political ideologies, like fascism, can arise from socialist ideology.

And it did. Much like how Stalin’s USSR was socialist in nature.

Learn to accept it, you’ll be better off and more honest for it.

We mourn. We remember.  We stand with the LGBTQ community against hate and violence.