Just Gonna Put This Post Up Again: I Need $290 To Fix My Car So It Actually Runs And I Am Able To Leave

The Body Shapes of the World’s Best Athletes Compared Side By Side

On w*ndigoag:

W*ndigoag/w*ndigo are sacred Algonquian spirits that have spread to other Anishinaabe cultures. They aren’t worshiped or whatever, they are feared.

They’re the physical embodiments of evil, the result of a person falling into the trap of greed and cruelty, usually in the form of cannibalism. Our fear not only stems from the spirits and the danger they pose to others, but also their implications and the constant reminder that anyone can become a monster if they allow themselves to.

They are not bipedal deer and I have no idea where that concept came from. Most traditional depictions show them as humanoid giants made of ice, usually with the body of the person they came from encased inside.

In some stories, they’re killed by people, usually via fire. In others, they can only be killed by luring them to a body of water and getting the attention of a water spirit to fight it.

There’s very, very few stories where the person can be saved. The transformation into a w*ndigo is not a reversible one, and the only real way to save someone from that existence is to free them with death.

We censor their names because, traditionally, we’re taught not to say them out loud in case we get the attention of one or summon one. This is especially important during winter or at night.

They are not benign spirits. They are not kind. They are not rational. They are evil and cruel, and their only desires center around killing and eating. They’re as rational and logical as a wild raccoon in the late stages of rabies.

You cannot work with them. They can’t be bound, and they definitely can’t be bought or sold. Do not trust any spirit who claims to be a w*ndigo and do not trust any spirit worker who tries to sell you one.

W*ndigoag are Algonquian and Anishinaabe spirits. Algonquian people are the authorities on them, other Anishinaabe people less so. Non-Anishinaabe Natives cannot say that appropriation of w*ndigoag is okay because that isn’t their culture and it’s definitely not their decision to make. You cannot give someone permission to use something that isn’t yours.

The use of w*ndigoag in non-Native media is appropriation. The only exception to this is in when the creators work with Algonquian people to make respectful and accurate depictions. You’ll be very hard pressed to find cases of this.

W*ndigoag are not cryptids because they are sacred spirits. Abrahamic angels are not cryptids. Japanese yokai are not cryptids. Vodou loa are not cryptids. Respect indigenous beliefs as legitimate spirituality instead of reducing our cultures down to bastardized stories.

If you aren’t Anishinaabe, you cannot be “wendigokin”. Appropriation of indigenous spirituality isn’t suddenly okay because your ~soul~ is an indigenous spirit. You are not entitled to our cultures or spiritual beliefs. Jfc.

“Wendigocore” is also bullshit, what the fuck is wrong with you all? Our sacred spirituality is not your ugly ass aesthetic.

(Left those uncensored because it’s a summer afternoon and I want people in those tags to see this. Fuck off.)

Anishinaabe people are not obligated to share our SACRED STORIES with outsiders in order for them to be respected. We don’t want you to make your depictions of w*ndigoag in your stories more accurate. We just want you to leave our cultures alone for once.

Now please stop sending me messages about w*ndigoag. I understand you all just want to learn but I am so fucking tired. I’ve answered these questions dozens of times and I need a break.

Don’t start discourse on this post. I am not in the mood for it.

If any Algonquian or other Anishinaabe people have corrections, hmu. 

anyway I've got no food now because the fridge broke and it's hot as fuck and I didn't realize it was broken until it was too late, and now my Uber money ($25, which is all I had) for my vaccine appointment on Saturday is gonna be gone, and I'm not getting any more until June, so if you're able and could take pity on me to get food for this month, here's my Kofi, I love you and sorry

Prince Apollo was a fool and didn't deserve her anyway.

If you need to laugh childishly today, it has been 6969 days since the year 2000 ended.

Bill Gates will kill us all

2.5b people in Earth’s 130 poorest countries have not been vaccinated. The 85 poorest countries won’t be vaccinated until 2023. The humanitarian cost is unforgivable - and self-defeating, as each infected person is a potential source of new strains.

https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19-5-february-2021

How the actual fuck did this happen?

What happened to the early pledges by governments, the WHO, public health experts and leading research institutions to create global cooperation in vaccine development, eschewing patents and secrecy so that we could rescue our species?

That dream was smashed.

Many people helped create our vaccine apartheid, the single individual who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly ideological “philanthropic” foundation, which exists to push his pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.

It was Gates who sabotaged the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), replacing it with his failed ACT-Accelerator, a system of patents and secrecy and vast profits for the pharma industry, ornamented with nonbinding, failed promises of access for poor nations.

It was Gates who convinced Oxford to renege on its promise of patent-free access to its publicly funded vaccine research for the global south in favor of exclusive patent access for Astrazeneca.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/

When we hear ghoul sellouts like Howard Dean pushing the racist, genocidal lie that “patents don’t matter” because brown people in poor countries can’t make vaccines, we’re hearing Gates’s talking points:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream

Gates’s role in vaccine apartheid is laid out in exquisite detail in Natalie Sure’s outstanding New Republic feature, which delves into Gates’s longstanding project to sideline democratic governments and cooperation in favor of monopoly tyranny.

https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines

This goes way, way back. I mean, *waaaay* back, all the way to 1976, when Gates wrote his infamous “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” decrying the dominant, cooperative mode of software development and calling its practitioners thieves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Gates’s fortune depended on creating a software monopoly, and that monopoly required “intellectual property” protection. Gates has always been a monopolist, and so naturally, he loves IP (before “IP” was a common term, copyrights and patents were called “monopolies”).

Intellectual property is a very important part of the inequality story, the story of how we got to a world where billions of people are denied vaccines and where all people face new, more virulent strains as a result.

As UNCTAD chief economist Richard Kozul-Wright told Lynn Fries for GPE: “[IP allows companies] to grab a larger share of what has already been produced in the economy.”

It’s a means of extracting rents, not for doing things, but for OWNING things.

IP is key to tax avoidance: companies like Ikea transfer “IP” (the Ikea trademark) to a numbered company in a tax haven; each national Ikea subsidiary pays “licensing fees” for the trademark equal to 100% of their in-country profits, so they never earn a (taxable) cent.

The transformation of the world into a monopolized system of IP-heavy, rent-extracting, tax-dodging companies really kicked into gear after 1999, with the signing of the WTO agreement and its IP adjunct, the TRIPPS, and as Shure details, Gates was instrumental there.

For this part of the story, Shure talks to Jamie Love, who was at the UN when NGOs like his were pushing to create vaccine and other pharma pools for the global south, while pharma companies handed out pamphlets bearing the Gates Foundation logo, smearing the plan.

Though the US delegation struggled for credibility, the combination of the Gates Foundation, and former US trade officials fronting for  the global pharma industry managed to sideline the project, which was being driven by the demand for equitable access to AIDS drugs.

With Gates’s help, the WTO emerged as an IP enforcement powerhouse. Shure cites Dylan Mohan Gray: “it took Washington 40 years to threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions and less than four to threaten the post-apartheid Mandela government over AIDS drugs.”

Incredibly, the Gates Foundation used this to burnish its humanitarian image: they solicited donations from pharma companies and used them to subsidize AIDS drugs in the global south, a maneuver that let them seem like philanthropists.

When in reality, they had overseen a program to systematically deny the world’s poorest and most threatened people the right to make their own drugs, making them dependent on the whims of multinational corporate charity instead.

Sound familiar? Today, Gates runs around repeating the lie that poor people can’t make their own medicine,  saying that patent exemptions won’t make a difference now - to the extent he’s right, the world *now* is the crucial one.

Having sabotaged the efforts by poor countries to engage in the kind of production ramp-up the rich world saw as vaccines were being developed, it may *now* be too late. “Because of my bad ideas *then*, it’s too late *now*.”

The connection between IP and elite philanthropy is deep and important. IP’s rent-seeking and tax-dodging has made poor countries beholden to offshore monopolists in health, agriculture and IT, and then starved them of taxes to build up domestic alternatives.

This, in turn, makes them dependent on “gifts” from the billionaires who arm-twisted them into IP treaties, forced them to pay rent on all domestic production, and then profit-shifted the funds out of the reach of their tax-collectors.

As Anand Giridharadas reminded us in his seminal “Winners Take All,” the core purpose of elite philanthropy has been the same since the robber-baron era: to burnish the reputations of monsters who take everything and give back crumbs.

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

Reading Jamie Love’s quotes in Shure’s article reminded me of my own time working with Jamie and Knowledge Ecology International at WIPO in Geneva, when I was an NGO delegate to a global DRM treaty.

You see, at WIPO, the vast majority of NGOs aren’t human rights organizations or other public interest groups - they’re industry associations representing tech, entertainment, broadcast and pharma monopolists.

These guys - almost all guys - were just aghast when real NGOs started showing up for these meetings and were absolutely shameless in their sabotage of our efforts to balance their corporate lies (absolutely bald-faced lies were routinely entered into the debates).

How petty? Well, they had been accustomed to writing up “fact-sheets” for the day’s debate and handing them off to WIPO staffers working for the secretariat, who would photocopy them and set them out on literature tables for the national delegates.

So we started doing this too: we’d take careful notes on the day’s debates, convene with global experts to debunk industry association lies, get our Indymedia friends to translate them into six languages, and hand them off to the secretariat in the morning for copying.

So they got the secretariat - a former US textiles negotiator who made her bones helping create the conditions for slave labor in places like Bangladesh - to end the practice of photocopying papers for all NGOs.

Of course the industry bodies had cushy offices in Geneva, whereas we stayed in flophouses and youth hostels. They could ask their underlings to come in early and do their copying for them, whereas we had to take a bus to the all-night copy-shop to get our handouts copied.

Here’s where it gets super-weird: our handouts started to go missing. We’d set out our stacks of paper on the literature tables before the morning session and an hour later, they’d all be gone, but none of the delegates had managed to get a copy.

We found those missing handouts…in the garbage, behind potted plants and in the *toilets*.

No, seriously.

And here’s the kicker: during the ensuing furore, the main response from the pharma lobbyists was to object to us calling ourselves “public interest NGOs.”

I’ll never forget this smarmy sociopath in his expensive suit, with his shit-eating grin, standing there saying, “Phamaceuticals serve the public interest, and our industry association is a nonprofit. We are a non-profit, public-interest NGO.”

It was a remarkable sight. 20 years later, their version of the public interest - the doctrine of Gates - has produced a multi-billion-person reservoir of the sick and vulnerable who are doomed to serve as factories for highly virulent variants.

This is a literally genocidal doctrine, and it threatens our very civilization. It’s a funny kind of non-profit, public interest move for an industry and its billionaire ideologue funders to have made.

But hey, at least no one’s “intellectual property” took a hit.

I am currently freaking out. The maintenance guys came to look at my floor in my apartment yesterday(it’s caving in due to water damage in the bathroom and the hallway)and now we have to move out because it’s unsafe for us to stay there. I have approximately $25 in my bank account and we have two weeks to find somewhere else to stay. I don’t know what to do. We have zero money and no one who can take us in for a while. My parents are currently hosting my mom’s sister who is very sick(she has ALS)so they don’t have the space and my in-laws are in another state. Neither of us has friends who can take us in either. If anyone can help with funding that would be amazing. I’ve found a couple of apartments that can get us in soon but it’s going to be expensive. I am the only one with steady income and I make about $1100 a month which pretty much barely covers our bills as is. 

My Ko-fi is: https://ko-fi.com/xombigirl

My PayPal: sherlockianliza@gmail.com

My Venmo: xombigirl

Boys are allowed to be feminine and that includes trans boys, pass it on. Girls are allowed to be masculine and that includes trans girls, pass it on. Nonbinaries are allowed to use feminine or masculine expression, pass it on.

Please don’t be surprised when a homeless person doesn’t want to leave their encampment or spot for a cooling center; this is the type of opportunity cops will take to clear out encampments while the owners of the stuff they’re throwing away are in centers trying to survive.

If you really want to give them some peace of mind, offer to rent them a storage locker for a few days so they can rest easy in cooler, less oppressive temps without losing everything they have left.

Source: I was homeless many times.

I’m humbly asking for a little help for myself since this is probably the worst trauma of my life right now.

Dad was t-boned by a drunk driver Friday night, the car was spun and he was ejected through the windshield into the engine (the hood opens different from most cars) and was trapped unconscious burning til a passerby saved his life. He’s going to need amputations, and he’s combative about all care, so not only are we fighting to keep him alive, we’re fighting HIM to do it (he’s phobia-terrified of hospitals). NONE of us have had sleep.

I have to stay home from work to help with things here, and I can’t afford to stay home. I’m only part time at work and make about $180 a week, and i really seriously need the income to stay up on bills, but there is no way I can leave right now. I’ve already missed two days and I’m not coming in next week either (there’s too much we have to legally do within a certain time frame even with the trauma we’re all trying to process) but the loss of paycheck isn’t doable but if I go into work I’m gonna break down (none of us have slept) but if I don’t go into work next I can’t pay my bills (unless like, can you pay a credit card with a credit card somehow? I’ve had maybe 15hrs of sleep in six days since it happened I can’t think straight but if that’s an option it can keep me floating til I double pay I guess idfk I can’t think)

I just need a little bit of help. Dad has a severe concussion (a literal softball sized lump on his head where he went through the windshield), the vertebra that supplies blood oxygen to the brain is fractured, and the surgeon just said he’s probably gonna lose 2 fingers from the fourth degree burns on his hand (you can see his tendons— his knuckle is completely gone- and the burns have pretty much degloved him. Do NOT google that if you don’t know what it is). I am very much still in shock even if it doesn’t seem like it. A human person should never look how my dad does, and he should absolutely be dead rn.

If anyone could spare a couple bucks or reblog or whatever, I’d super appreciate it. It would be one less thing for me to worry about and I’m absolutely desperate for any kind of help with things rn because I don’t know what to do. We’re all so exhausted on maybe 2-3hrs of sleep a night, my mom couldn’t remember how to turn on the tv with the remote and started sobbing (that’s ALL our brain states right now) and I’m the oldest child and trying to keep shit together..

I’d really appreciate if anyone could spare a few bucks just so I can keep my head above water while drowning in everything else. If you can’t, I’d really really appreciate reblogs.

https://ko-fi.com/A5541GD

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