Leonidas @leonidas@sunbeam.city

miss piggy has to be one of the most sexually available puppets of all time

I just saw the Radio Shack cryptocurrency thing*, and I suddenly had a flashback to the dot com bubble. I worked through that period, but I didn't help build it. I've always worked on building physical products that have to be manufactured and shipped to people. Anyway, I'm beginning to feel like there's a new bubble/scam forming, and once again I will be outside of it. Probably affected in some way, but not willingly participating in it.

* https://cybre.space/@muffinista/107470540669294465

the history of all hitherto existing sexuality is the history of ass struggle

shipping characters ironically is a gateway to shipping them genuinely

funny as hell to learn that journalists think Tom Clancy books are real and they're all afraid of a tom Clancy day where china invades Taiwan while Russia invades the ukraine

"Issaquah–Preston Trail" https://flic.kr/p/ym745q #bicycleinfrastructure #biking #cycling #photog #photography

like and subscribe and don't forget to mash that 'show more' button

The world’s tallest cat scratching tower is over 32 ft tall and weighs over 10 tons.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/111699-tallest-cat-scratching-tree

Original tweet : https://twitter.com/tilbots/status/1471617818638659584

masto meet up at ihop

My partner brought up the fact that if Russia, China, Black people, Muslims, or any other favorite group the US military industrial complex likes to pick on, had been killing between 1,000 and 2,000 Americans per day, the US would have gone after that group Iraq-war-style. Instead, our two political parties (mostly Republicans) are trying to normalize COVID, and are trying to pretend we're not capable of mounting a similar effort against it instead. (1/_)

I'm so fucking pissed at Amazon killing their workers. It's not new, amazon has been working warehouse employees to death for years.

But last weekend, 6 people died as a direct result of Amazon's willful negligence.

A death by negligence, by forcing someone into conditions which cause their death, is as much as a murder as any killing with a weapon. The murder weapon is the work and circumstances the person is forced into, and the most sinister part of this, is ensuring that the responsibility for any such murder lies in the hands of as many people as possible.

For it's possible to hold a person responsible for killing another, but nearly impossible to hold responsible every member of a mob for lynching a chosen scapehoat.

The function of a lynching is twofold; to enact retribution against one who would act against the ruling system, and use their death as a warning and a threat against others who would do the same. Suppress resistance under threat of death. To impress upon the marginalized and downtrodden that if they don't abide by the abuses acted upon them, that they too could be killed.

And so our systems of capital have contrived and conspired to uphold a system where those in power can constitute their own mob, and even be free of the responsibility of knowing who they lynch; they can be certain that people will die as a result of their actions, but they don't have to decide whom, they just have to do what they're going to do anyway; maximize profit. And they can be as free from any responsibility for the deaths they cause as any single member of a lynch mob can say "I didn't touch them" or "I didn't put the rope around their neck"

And the deaths of the workers, and of the marginalized, downtrodden, and poor, serve precisely the same function as a lynch mob of just a few decades ago; to kill those at the bottom, who might be inclined to rise up against the system of abuse inflicted upon them, and to impress upon the other downtrodden that if they don't behave, then they too could be subjected to the same isolated and alienated death.

The actual inclination of the victim to resist their abuses does not matter one bit. That they are a member of a marginalized class is enough. Because most members of a marginalized class have basically the same reasons to resist an abusive system, so any single individual could possess this inclination, and the actual intent of the victim matters not; whether someone who might actually be inclined to resist is killed, or whether their death discourages resistance from someone else, the outcome is the same.

And you might say, "I don't think that's really an accurate assessment of how the ruling class relate to deaths of the poor; what reason would they have to want their own workers to die?"

Workers cost money to maintain. The intent of the ruling class is to make money. If the cost of keeping the worker alive exceeds some arbitrary measure of value, then they won't.

to quote "Fight Club"

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

This cynical assessment of the cost of keeping workers and people alive is conducted at every level, to minimize costs, including the cost of labor.

I leave you with a quote from a very prescient movie, Network (1976)

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell,

and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

I am mad.

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.

The question then becomes.

What are we going to do about it?

Get mad. Then make a plan.

Then follow through on it.

The first step is to wake up from the stupor of the 2 years.

I think a lot of us have been stuck inside waiting.
Waiting for things to change, waiting for people to get their shit together, waiting for things to get better so that we can get back to our lives.

That's not going to happen.

There's no going back. The world is falling apart. In the past month there's been two separate historic rainstorm/flood disasters in the PNW, back-to-back out-of-season tornado-spawning storms in the midwest. Unseasonal heat delaying onset of winter across basically the whole united states.

I think must of us know by now that spending our time to produce labor for the corporations is a scam. And while it's a scam, what's the point of working to uphold a system whose primary purpose is currently to extract as much profit as possible from a society and a planet coming apart at the seams as a result of that very same greed?

What the fuck is the point of working when it's the end of the world as we know it?

If it's the end of the world as we know it, and we're seeing the birth of a new one, then don't we get to decide for ourselves what our place in the new world is?

How fucking boring to decide that I want my place in the new world that we're going to be living in to still involve rent and bosses and managers and cars and asphalt.

Decide what you want your place in the world to look like for yourself.

Don't wait for the profit-seekers to tell you what your place in the world will look like.

I guess yuo could say my wife amd I have a "decentralized relationship".. .