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Made it to Wano. This is my contribution

i'm literally begging people to relearn how to use earbuds and headphones. i don't wanna hear your fucking tiktok while im waiting for my flight.

Swan Song: An illustrated poetry zine about Law and Doflamingo (by me!)

Warning: Major major one piece spoilers of wano and egghead!!!!!

Tw: death & blood

The idea of luffy’s vivre card flash-banging sabo in that pitch black bilge is making me laugh so much

Bonuses:

Full pic of that last page👇

Here’s the full pic of this since it being a gif absolutely tanked the quality of the image.

the destruction of knowledge and culture

Repost of Instagram post by alessandra_sanguinetti:

“In 2004 I worked as an intern in Newsweek and had to go through the wires coming in from the Middle East.

The Iraq war was raging. Israel was committing its routine violations and killings.

The images were devastating and unequivocally condemning of both the USA and Israel, but I remember the editors would reject all my picks and demand images of burnt cars or vague images of destruction.

So I brought a hard drive and collected everything they didn't publish.

It was my first live glimpse of the lack of ethics or integrity in most US media.

Not the journalists on the ground, but of the senior editors making the calls - in their self important glass cubicles.

And no, to the cynics out there..it's not all too complicated to discuss on social media.

Social media is the only reason we know what's happening in Palestine.

And the only reason mainstream news has to keep up and sprinkle some actual news now and then.

Meanwhile we are seeing much less footage coming out of Gaza - Israel has been killing off all the journalists.

This is terrifying.”

Photo credits: Nasser Ishtayeh, Yossi Alon, Saif Dahlah, Jaafar Ashtiyeh, Musa Al-Shaer, Abed Onar Qusini

Every Friday, millions of Yemenis, themselves survivors of genocide, protest the genocide of Gaza

I think it's always important to be reminded that the worst video you have seen from Gaza is in fact a drop in an ocean of atrocities committed by Israel every single minute of every day. Think about it, for that video to reach you, the horrific moment had to happen with someone who has a camera to be around and for that person to have a functioning phone service to upload it and for the video to circulate enough in order to reach you. Always remember that what you're seeing is what is happening to a single person out of over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza trying to survive this genocide, each one of them with a heartbreaking story of their own that probably will never manage to reach your feed. Things are infinitely worse than what we can even fathom. 

Israel has killed more children in Gaza since October than in four years of worldwide conflict

Fun History Fact: The overwhelming majority of cowboys in the U.S. were Indigenous, Black, and/or Mexican persons. The omnipresent white cowboy is a Hollywood studio concoction meant to uphold the mythology of white masculinity.

Fun History Fact: The overwhelming majority of cowboys in the U.S. were Indigenous, Black, and/or Mexican persons. The omnipresent white cowboy is a Hollywood studio concoction meant to uphold the mythology of white masculinity.

In the early 70s Sesame Street was created with an eye towards educating poor, inner-city children for free, and became a massive hit with all children. In 2016, faced with going off the air forever after facing conservative efforts to destroy public broadcasting since basically its beginning, new episodes became a timed exclusive for premium cable network HBO. In 2022 HBO Max, newly merged with and taken over by reality TV channel Discovery, removed Sesame Street episodes and spin-offs from streaming as a tax write-off and scheme to avoid paying residuals.

It's crazy that these strikes are happening given that all the writers and actors are asking for is less than 0.3% of the revenue these studios make.

Facebook deleted this almost immediately. It's almost like the ultrawealthy don't want us knowing or talking about what's at stake.

okay, hot take, but I thought the Bilad the Shuite outfit was good. Like in way does it compare to some of Crowley's better looks, but I liked it! It was good!!

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

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

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Pixel art ninjago! I love making pixel art but wow, it can be super difficult!

End Simulation… (This was a mistake)

Will you come back again? I only need a friend (When it’s all said and done Will you need me too?) Only Friend - Wallows

OH WAIT, WAIT, I’M BREAKING, CALL HOUSTON BECAUSE I HAVE A PROBLEM. 

AND A MOVIE!!!!!

bitches will see the names abed nadir or troy barnes and hit reblog

it’s me. im bitches

Today, many may be getting ready to sit down to a feast with their families in celebration of what’s commonly called “Thanksgiving”. Before you do so, take some time to think about the real significance behind this day and the histories that have been buried deep from view. Learn about National Day of Mourning and why this day is treated much differently among First Nations peoples. For many, this day marked the beginning of a long, horrific, still-ongoing history of violence. Talk to your family members about what truly occurred this day and what it means to the Native people of these lands. Find out what Indigenous lands you’re currently on and the ways you can help to support, uplift, and amplify the First Nations people in your area. Wishing everyone a meaningful National Day of Mourning. 

Note: while the term “Indian” is used by Wamsutta James in his quoted speech, and some Nations use it to refer to themselves, it’s best to refer to Native people as Indigenous, Native, or First Nations out of respect (especially if you’re not Indigenous yourself).

oh he is NOT listening 😭😭