#June: ...if we restructure some things that's it

[suniastrology]

SATURN RETROGRADE – JUNE 4 to OCTOBER 23, 2022 What does it mean and how it could affect us? Each year, Saturn, the planet of time, responsibilities, truth; limits and regulations is retrograding for approximately 4,5 months. At the moment this takes place in the sign of Aquarius which represents one of the astrological houses (area of life) in your birth chart. When a planet retrogrades, in astrology, is considered that things in certain area/s in your life are slowing down or needs to be revisit, reflect or re -do. Because of the nature of the planet and its representations in astrology Saturn tend to delay things and during this retrograde period this could be felt more significantly. We tend to experience retrogrades more internally on a physical, emotional, mental or spiritual sense.

Saturn retrograde in particular may ask as to go back and correct mistakes, to re-do things where a certain standard is not met, to go a check detail and to amend and adjust; to study and master your craft thoroughly before put things into practice. Retrograde Saturn is about reality check and questions we might ask and reflect upon during these near 5 months period could be: What I’ve done well and where I can improve? Why I wasn’t able to complete a project in a successful manner and what else I could do to achieve desirable results? Where do I have to be more discipline and organise so I can build a solid foundation and to progress further? Where hard work, commitments and even sacrifices could be made so recognition and rewards can be experienced? What are my fears and uncertainties and what I can do to go against them and to overcome them?...

All above are just some examples which might trigger your thoughts and intentions in taking actions in such directions and manner towards your progress and success in certain departments in your life. The answers for these questions could be found within your rather than outer influences. But be aware that Saturn is not an easy planet. It requires truthfulness, hard work, patience and commitment. If you manage to reflect on matters with rationality, realistic and practical approach, the retrograde period could be a beneficial ‘asset’ when Saturn turns direct on October 23 when thing will start move faster and where tangible results could unfold. You may feel free and liberated and forward moving after this hard work behind the scene during the Saturn retrograde. Therefore, use these few months in learning, planning, organising, restructuring or correct things. Be patient and trust the process.

Everything described above could be relevant for your personal and professional life as well as love, health, finances, etc. ‘ Keep in mind that these are GENERAL ASTROLOGICAL TENDENCIES and how exactly this energy will influence you it’s depending on your personal horoscope, but most definitely you will feel these astrological events in one way or another, especially, in some areas in your life. And remember, that singe astrological event does not represent the whole picture in a personal or on a collective level.

Best wishes

suni astrology

#astroworld #astrology #suniastrology #astrologer #zodiac #planets in astrology #horoscope #planetary transits #astrological events #astro community #tropicalzodiac #learnastrology #saturn retrograde #saturnretrograde2022 #saturninaquarius #retrograde planets #astrological houses #birth chart #june 2022 horoscope #astrologicalevent #retrograde saturn effect

[vampireinterview]

I posted 6,372 times in 2022

411 posts created (6%)

5,961 posts reblogged (94%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@vampireinterview

@castiellesbian

@dualityofcastiel

@hotgirlcastiel

@casgirlisms

I tagged 1,557 of my posts in 2022

#ofmd - 117 posts

#iwtv - 79 posts

#wwdits - 57 posts

#succession - 31 posts

#prev - 25 posts

#dracula daily - 20 posts

#the boys - 18 posts

#heartstopper - 18 posts

#the seven husbands of evelyn hugo - 13 posts

#ghost files - 11 posts

Longest Tag: 127 characters

#anyway!! 0.01% in polish 💃💃💃 23.18% italian 💃💃💃 we’re doing good this summer just you wait until i understand congiuntivo

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

ok but if we take a second to be serious. THE most compelling evidence. the only thing that genuinely feels unexplainable even if we make the furthest of reaches. is the becky episode and the funko pops and the becky’s reaction to chuck’s ending and how she says that there is not enough cas and the villains aren’t scary enough for the stakes of the story to be taken seriously and there is not enough classic rock and the villain monologue is unoriginal. THAT is what will haunt me for the rest of my life

1,457 notes - Posted November 5, 2022

#4

i need all spnblr bloggers to realize that we’re already on the frontlines of making tumblr inhospitable to outside enemy forces

1,674 notes - Posted November 7, 2022

#3

wwdits really spent an episode with half the crew frantically trying to restructure the entire vampiric council in order to make enough money to pay the bills. meanwhile nandor went down to the storage room and went. hmm. whatever should i do with all this priceless treasure ive stored for future occurances

2,448 notes - Posted July 16, 2022

#2

this seems like a good occassion to remind everybody to donate to the abortion dream team in poland. they’re an activist group that helps conduct about 4 safe abortions an hour for polish residents (which currently also includes 4.2 millions of ukrainian reffugees). poland currently utilizes one the strictest abortion laws in all of europe (with the only stricter laws being those of the vatican city and malta): abortion is prohibited even in cases of severe medical complications and can only be performed if there is an absolute certainty of death of the pregnant person during childbirth or when there is a documented rape ruling (which is effectively impossible to prove in court within a couple of months, as evidenced by the fact that there usually are only 1-3 such cases every year). even though the majority of poland doesn’t agree with the law (some estimates state that among people aged 18-35 about 85% support free will abortion choice), it doesn’t seem like the there will be any lighter law introduced anytime soon (with the leftist party being the only one with a hard pro-choice stance). meanwhile many people are suffering the consequences of the law which causes medical professionals to deny abortion even in cases like that of Izabela from Pszczyn who died in September of 2021 after the doctors made her wait for an abortion until the heart of the dying fetus inside would completely stop beating. she died of sepsis in the hospital, leaving her family and her 9 year old daughter. many more cases like this are happening in poland and any donation can help prevent it by funding access to safe abortions abroad for those who need it.

2,745 notes - Posted June 24, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

ANYWAY. i would love it if you reblogged this with the best book you read in 2022 so far

16,570 notes - Posted August 7, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#NOT ME HAVING MYSELF IN MOST REBLOGGED BLOGS NOO LMAO #i truly talk to myself too much

[silverfoxlou]

How Metallica Regained Ownership of 'Master of Puppets' and Scored That 'Stranger Things' Synch

"We try not to deal in schlock, since we own this stuff," says the band's manager.

Warning: light spoilers ahead.

In addition to landing back-to-1986 hits as plot devices in the latest Stranger Things season, Kate Bush and Metallica have an unusual thing in common: Both own their master recordings, and no longer have to split revenues with the record labels that signed them years ago. That means Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” which helps Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) avoid psychological torture in the Netflix hit, and Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” which Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) covers to lure demonic bats away from his friends, draw all of the synch revenue from the masters.

“[Stranger Things] came to us and said, ‘We want to do this thing with “Master of Puppets,” but we’re not sure how much of the master we want to use,'” says Cliff Burnstein, the band’s longtime co-manager and co-founder of Q Prime Management. “We try not to deal in schlock, since we own this stuff. We don’t want to be associated with bad shows. This was a good show.”

The first conversation about “Master of Puppets,” between Nora Felder, the show’s music supervisor, and Hannah Davis, Q Prime’s director of creative sync licensing, happened in November 2020; the band agreed to a deal within 24 hours. Burnstein calls prominent synchs in hit movies and games “major money,” while TV series are generally “a small amount of money,” so a series “has to appeal to us in some way.” He adds: “Nobody said to us, ‘This is going to be the climactic scene.’ I don’t know if they knew how the show was going to be edited.”

On June 20, Netflix invited the band to view the scene “under strict security,” according to Burnstein, the first time Metallica knew the song would be central to the plot. “The Kate Bush story had become massive at that point. None of us were thinking, ‘This is going to be the next Kate Bush,'” Burnstein says. “We were all blown away by the clip.” (In an new Instagram post, the band said it was “beyond psyched.”)

Bush’s reps did not respond to a request to discuss how the British singer came to own her masters, but Burnstein tells Metallica’s story in an interview. “I’ll try to edit it down,” he says.

After the band’s pop breakthrough Metallica in 1991, Robert Krasnow, the longtime chairman of Metallica’s 10-year label, Elektra, promised to restructure its deal into a joint-venture partnership. But in August 1994, Robert Mergado took over as chairman of Elektra’s parent company, Warner Music Group, and reneged on the deal, as Metallica alleged at the time. In the Los Angeles Times, drummer Lars Ulrich called Mergado’s actions “greedy and arrogant” and added, “Our faith in this company has been flushed down the drain.”

Citing California’s “seven-year statute,” which movie stars had used to break free from long-running studio contracts, the band sued Elektra in September 1994. A Warner executive at the time, Mel Lewinter, helped steer Metallica into a settlement: In exchange for its masters, Metallica would fulfill its contract for two remaining albums, then add two more — these became Garage Inc., S&M, St. Anger and Death Magnetic. “It took a long time — much longer than we had hoped — to record all those albums,” Burnstein says. “You watch the documentary Some Kind of Monster and you see why it took so fucking long.”

In 2013, Metallica took control of its own master recordings, and today Q Prime handles the band’s affairs, sometimes with help from Warner-owned Rhino Records in a distribution deal. So, it was a management company, not a record label, that secured the Stranger Things synch.

Since the show debuted last Friday, the eight-minute-and-36-second track “Master of Puppets” has become a 36-year-old catalog hit. It’s No. 6 on Spotify’s U.S. chart as of Thursday (July 7), and total on-demand plays among all streaming services grew from 253,000 on June 30, the day before the Stranger Things episode, to 1.43 million on July 4, according to Luminate. Due to the ’90s settlement, the band gets to keep almost all of that streaming revenue from the master recording. And add new fans. “Our goal is always to reach the younger audience,” Burnstein says. “It was like, ‘Stranger Things is going to get a lot of looks, and we’ll solidify our base with our young fans, and maybe grow it some.'”

#synch #back catalog

[lastparty]

maybe there is something about the seventh of June: Gwen, Prince and me . . . or maybe people just have to be born at some time . . . and there are only three hundred sixty-five days or three sixty-six every four years or so . . . meaning that some things happen at the same time in the same rising sign . . . and the same houses in Gemini . . . but some of us might also consider the possibility of reincarnating revolving restructuring that spirit . . . reshaping that spirit . . . releasing that spirit . . . tucking the use- less inside and when the useless pushes out again we restructure again and poetry and song and praisesong go on  . . . because it is the right thing to do we always will cry when a great heart . . . a good soul . . . one of the premier poets of her age restructures . . . reincarnates  . . . revolves into a resolve that we now carry in our hearts . . . as all great women and men are alive . . . not by biology but remem- brance . . . and that’s all right . . . as the old folk say . . . because as long as they stay on the lips . . . they nestle in our hearts and those souls which are planted . . . continue growing . . . until generations not knowing their touch . . . their voice . . . or even the fact that some Chicago poets are terrible cooks . . . but always fun to eat with . . . will tell tales of having met someone who knew someone who once watched a basketball game . . . in which some Chicago poet cheered for Seattle at the request of some Virginia poet who wanted more games . . . while Mr. Blakely was amazed that a Chicago poet was even watching a game . . . and didn’t we miss him as he slipped away watching baseball . . . and what a way to go . . . though we then did sort of know . . . that once gone . . . he would call the woman he loved and so we come to no more phone calls at six a.m. to chat ... and no more Benihana when we are all in New York . . . and no more gossiping and questioning and trying to make sense of a senseless world . . . no more face-to-face . . . only the poetry which is a great monument from this Topeka daughter to the world . . . and yet . . . there can be no complaints in this passing . . . no sorrow songs . . . no if onlys . . . it is all here: the work the love: the woman: who gave and gave and gave . . . no complaints of too long or too hard . . . no injustice of accident or misunderstanding of disease . . . just one great woman moving to the next phase . . . and us on the ground . . . giving Alleluias

— No Complaints, Nikki Giovanni (For Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917—2001)

#words

[dailyaudiobiblechronological]

6/10/2022 DAB Chronological Transcription

Proverbs 22 - 24

Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible Chronological, I'm China. Today is the 10th day of June, welcome. So great to be here with you today. Today we continue on in the book of Proverbs with chapters 22 - 24, and we continue on this week with the English Standard Version.

Commentary

I love in today's reading we read by wisdom a house is built and by understanding it is established. By knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. That just feel so beautiful. To read that for a second I'm kind of like imagining my house and wisdom is building it, and understanding it is established, and knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. I think this is a metaphor. But also to think about a house being built by these things and the rooms being filled, that would be a big deal to say like yeah, wisdom built my house, understanding it's, established he was here too. And then there's precious and pleasant riches that fill my rooms. You should go check it out. That would be so cool. And I think it's a metaphor saying that we are these houses that are built and by understanding and wisdom it is built and it's established. And with knowledge, the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches. And that we would be people that are filled with strength and a man of knowledge enhances his might, provide wise guidance you can wage your war and then abundance of counselors there's victory. I mean there's just so much goodness to reading the Proverbs the podcast would be days long if we tried to break each verse down and talked about what it's speaking to us. But that one in particular captivated me and it was just this imagery of like how imagine my house being built this way or wow, imagine myself being built this way. What if I were to really allow the Lord in the foundations of who I am, in the foundations of my faith and to restructure and to rebuild, and that's what it would look like.

Prayer

And so Father, I thank you for your word. I thank you for the image that you are giving us. I thank you for the images that you have given me. And Lord, I pray that we would be people who steward what you have shown us and what you've given us well. May we be people who speak freely and bountifully of all the good works that you have done and that you have shown that you've given us. And Lord, I just thank you for your wonders and your word and your might and the Holy Spirit that comes to comfort and guide and extort and honor. And Lord, may it be done in your glory and it's in your name we pray, amen.

Announcements

Dailyaudiobible.com is our website. That's the place of connections where you can see what's happening here in the community where you can get connected and stay connected. Be sure to check that out. If you have prayer requests or things that you are needing community to come alongside of you and encourage you and lift you up, you can call in 800-583-2164. That is all for today. I'm China. I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer Line

Hi DABC, it's Emmy from Illinois. Just calling in with appraise and just continued prayers but, my husband has been back to Church every week since Easter and last week we actually even went to a Church that he'd had some bad experiences at and had struggled with some forgiving of some people at the Church and he felt like he needed to take an extra step and forgive them in a way that was tangible by actually going back to Church there which was really cool and so just continue to pray that he would be open to hearing what God wants him to hear and convictions as well as for myself to continue. Obviously I'm not perfect either, so just prayers that I can be convicted in the ways that I've hurt our marriage as well as for us to both be open to growth and putting our marriage behind us and moving forward in a new marriage essentially. Our old marriage, not that we were divorced or anything, but our marriage prior to the last few years just needs to be done and we need to move forward so prayers that we can helpfully work through hurts and struggles from the past but still leave it in the past would be great. Yeah. I really appreciate your prayers. Thank you. Bye.

Hi, this is Pure Heart from Tennessee. I had just left Walmart and there was a young man that hit the door really hard on his way out and knocked it off track and I could just see the grimace and the anger in his face. So when I went in I noticed buggies turned over and displays knocked over and it was only because there was ten more minutes before customer service was to open and he wanted customer service. And right now I just want to pray for the people that leave themselves open for the enemy to use to kill, steal and destroy. Father God, I pray for this young man. I pray that you were given peace that passes all understanding. I put a hedge of protection around his mind and his heart and his spirit and soul. Lord God asking you to just anoint him with your spirit. Let him see Father God that you're greater than anything that this world would have to offer. And Father God I pray heavy protection around those that work in the public like grocery stores and service station fast foods for our officers and firefighters, anybody that works in the public. I just ask Father God, that you would just put a hedge protection around him and that you would defeat and confuse any assignment that Satan has for them in the name of Jesus and father God. I just thank you that even right now that you blessing and touching each and every one of my dad see family right now and asked that you'll just be with them.

Hey, DAB family, this is Roy from Ohio. I'm calling because my father's in the hospital right now. He felt some stomach pain and my mom had to drive him to the hospital. They should be back soon, but I just pray, ask for prayers for his health and recovery. I'm not 100% sure what he has. It's not the first time he said when I talked to him about it. I also pray for fire and for me to be more close to God. We love God more because I felt very distant and it's not because of him, but it's because of me because I've been doing things that I know I shouldn't be doing, and I get tempted and I do it and I know I shouldn't be having I'm just a mess. Please pray for me. Also pray for the dog my family got a few days ago. His name is Kai. We might have to run back tomorrow because we can't really take care of another dog, especially one like him. Then he's a lot of maintenance. So please pray for us and our family. Thank you.

Hey, my DABC family, this is Ashley from Texas. I called in, I want to say in January very distraught over being pregnant, not being married and, not wanting the child and all that craziness. And I just wanted to call in and tell you guys that when my prayer aired, and then I got this plethora of prayers from you guys, it was so overwhelming. It was like, oh, my God. And I was in such a terrible place at the time. We had broken up. I moved out, and I was very alone and very unhappy. And honestly, for a while there, I was the subject of many prayers, and it was like God was literally saying to me, I'm here, I'm taking care of you. You have not went without anything that you needed. And I really wanted to say thank you to all of your prayers. Just a quick update. I am officially 26 weeks today. I'll be seven months. Next week, my baby is going to be named Genesis Mackenzie young. We are obviously keeping her. We've decided to go to premarital counseling and get married, and we have started going to Church and trying to I've given my life to Christ. He's kind of on the fence, and so we're working through that. And I just wanted to come in and tell you guys, thank you so much. I'm still listening. I'm still praying for you guys. Love you.

[crimechannels]

By • Olalekan Fagbade BREAKING: NLC, TUC announce indefinite strike to ground activities nationwide from Oct 3 The leadership of the Nigeria Labour Congress [NLC] and the Trade Union Congress [TUC] have jointly resolved to ground activities nationwide from October 3, 2023, following what the Labour Unions tagged as the “failure” of government to successfully implement policies to alleviate the sufferings of Nigerians following the removal of the subsidy on Premium Motor Spirit, The PUNCH exclusively gathered. According the PUNCH the NLC national president, Joe Ajaero, during a virtual National Executive Council meeting which was held on Zoom, Tuesday told members of NEC that a meeting was held with the officials of the TUC to deliberate on ways forward. Ajaero noted that it was resolved that the two centres work together to make their stance known to the government. A source who was present at the meeting noted that some members of the NLC initially objected to the development of the NLC working together with the TUC. “Initially some members did not want us to work with the TUC but as of now, we don’t have a choice. The government has not been proactive. So it is going to be a definite action this time around.” The PUNCH reports that the 21-day ultimatum given by the NLC ended last week. The national president of the NLC, Joe Ajaero had complained that “none of the demands put before the Federal Government had been addressed.” The union first observed a two-day nationwide warning strike on September 5 and 6 to show its readiness for the indefinite strike later in the month. Among other things, the NLC and the TUC are asking for wage awards, implementation of palliatives, tax exemptions and allowances to public sector workers and a review of the minimum wage. President Bola Tinubu had on June 19 set up the Presidential Steering Committee and various sub-committees to discuss the framework to be adopted on the palliatives. Though the FG made a commitment to restructure the framework for engagement with organised Labour on palliatives, the eight-week timeframe set for the conclusion of the process expired in August with no action taken. The committees were given eight weeks to conclude their assignment and hasten the implementation of the framework in cushioning the effect of petrol subsidy removal on Nigerians but weeks after the timeframe expired, the sub-committees had yet to meet or actualise their mandates, leaving the NLC and TUC leadership frustrated. #NLC #TUCbeginsindefinitestrike

[richardsondavis]

Razörfist Explains His "Go Broke, Get Woke, Ultimately Croak" Theory At The Expense Of Volition Games And 'Barbie'

YouTuber Razörfist, who runs The Rageholic channel, recently explained his "Go Broke, Get Woke, Ultimately Croak" theory at the expense of Volition Games, who recently announced they were shutting down after the launch of the disastrous Saints Row reboot, and the recently released Barbie movie.

YouTuber Razörfist, who runs The Rageholic channel, recently explained his “Go Broke, Get Woke, Ultimately Croak” theory at the expense of Volition Games, who recently announced they were shutting down after the launch of the disastrous Saints Row reboot, and the recently released Barbie movie.

Volition Games announced they were shuttering in a post to LinkedIn on August 31st. It stated, “The Volition team has proudly created world-class entertainment for fans around the globe for 30 years. We’ve been driven by a passion for our community and always worked to deliver joy, surprise, and delight.”

“This past June, Embracer Group announced a restructuring program to strengthen Embracer and maintain its position as a leader in the video game industry. As part of that program, they evaluated strategic and operational goals and made the difficult decision to close Volition effective immediately,” the company announced.

The post concluded, “To help our team, we are working to provide job assistance and help smooth the transition of our Volition family members. We thank our customers and fans around the world for all the love and support over the years. You will always be in our hearts.” Reacting to the company’s shuttering by its parent company Embracer Group, Razörfist explained his “Go Broke, Get Woke, Ultimately Croak” theory.

He states, “I submit that the age-old axiom is not ‘get woke, go broke.’ In the immortal words of my boy, Donkey Kong, if you know the words, you can join in too. It’s go broke, get woke, ultimately croak.”

“And if three plus years of far too young actors and actresses dying suddenly has illustrated anything at all to us, it’s that if there’s anything the entertainment industry knows how to do with alacrity it’s croak,” he asserted.

He then turned his attention to Volition as an example, “The corpus du jour this past week: Volition entertainment, an icon in the video game industry. Architects of THQ’s The Punisher, Red Faction, and semi-satirical GTA mimeograph Saints Row. Until recently, one of the more respected and successful scions of the sandbox trend. Only recently reduced to a noxious kaka casserole of coastal pinko politics and pronouns.”

“The Saints Row reboot bombed so hard it was sponsored by Raytheon. But even beneath that billowing mushroom cloud, Volition’s express elevator to insolvency was wondrous to behold. Less than two years after insulting their audience for refusing to buy their Bolshevik bullshit, Volition are officially out of business,” he stated.

After briefly bragging that Volition is another mark that proves his hypothesis, Razörfist pointed to his past comments about Gillette and how he cautioned that the company’s embrace of wokeness and its subsequent stock loss was not actually evidence of the get woke, go broke axiom, but rather a move by Gillette “to make themselves compatible for corpo ESG to score some of that sweet, sweet merger money.”

As for why they would want this, Razörfist shares a clip of BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink explaining how he was using the company’s resources to change behaviors. Fink states, “Well, behaviors are gonna have to change and and this is one thing we’re asking companies. You have to force behaviors and at BlackRock we are forcing behaviors. 54% of the incoming class are women. We added four more points in terms of diverse employment this year.”

Fink continued, “What we’re doing internally is if you don’t achieve these levels of impact, your compensation could be impacted, okay. And so you have to force behaviors and if you don’t force behaviors whether it’s gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you’re going to be impacted. And that’s not just recruiting. It is development as Ken said and ultimately, it’s still going to take time, but I am just as much shocked as Ken is that we have not seen more opportunities and we’re going to have to force change.” Razörfist then laid out how Volition fits into his theory of “Go Broke, Get Woke, Ultimately Croak” theory, “It should surprise precisely no one that after filing for Chapter 11 in 2016, only to be acquired by gaming’s very own BlackRock, Deep Silver — Step 1. Go broke — Volition and the Saints Row series they’re known for got a botched femmscold facelift —Step 2. Get woke — only to be bailed out by the all-new BlackRock, Embracer, who took one lingering look at their year-over-year financials saw more red flags than Antifa Twitter space and shipped them off to the goddamn glue factory — Step 3. Ultimately croak.”

Moving on to Barbie, Razörfist excoriates those still using “get woke, go broke” because it allows critics to easily dismiss it by pointing to Barbie’s box office success. Razörfist explains this easily corrected when you apply the right family in “Go Broke, Get Woke, Ultimately Croak.”

In Barbie’s case, he explains, “Barbie went woke because parent company WB are beyond broke. While other studios slap superheroes on everything in their portfolios and printed money for the past two decades, Warner, outside of the odd Joker or Batman flick failed to cash in with equivalent successes of their own, sucking hind teat at the comic book buffet until, now, in 2023 when the genre’s rapidly deflating mommy mammaries produce only errant puffs of powdered f***ing milk.”

Razörfist elaborates, “To point a finer point on it, one month after banging out Barbie, WB dropped the world-smashing success that was Blue Beetle. A movie that bombed so biblically the actual Blue Beetle hired an illegal immigrant to fail for him.

He then asserts, “WB ain’t on step three. They’re at step f***ing one. Go broke. It’s clear then that what we’re witnessing then with Babs (Barbie) and blue balls (Blue Beetle) are the first pangs of Step 2. Warner wokeness as they desperately signal their compatibility with ESG ideation in an attempt to score deals or mergers with/or be bought the f**k out by anyone at all whose check will f***ing clear.”

Interestingly, WanerMedia was recently spun out of AT&T and merged with Discovery to form the new entity Warner Bros. Discovery. Obviously, Barbie like Blue Beetle was in the works before newly minted Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav took over the company and began an aggressive strategy to reduce the company’s enormous debt and increase its cash flow.

It’s unclear how this fits into Razörfist’s theory. There are probably a number of ways he might attack it. It could be shown as evidence that the entity that was Warner Bros. Pictures has already croaked as it was morphed into WarnerMedia under AT&T and then rolled into Warner Bros. Discovery. It’s dead, but they’ve just zombified to give it the appearance of life.

Another angle could be as simple as what he states in the above video, this is still the “get woke” stage and the entity could be completely gobbled up in a Disney and 20th Century Fox style merger where it would finally croak. What do you make of Razörfist’s theory?

I just wanted to share this with y'all!!! It reminds me of things to come. This does give me the stomach churns but I do get what RazorFist is saying. Wonderful!

#woke #anti-woke #opinion #razorfist #news #thoughts #blog #rant #bounding into comics #go woke go broke #it's actually go broke go woke ultimately croak

[fertility-journey-20s]

I'm struggling.

I was doing ok, I really was. I threw myself into watching what I eat and working out, working out filled up any alone time and helped me stop thinking about things but somethings happened this weekend and no amount of working out is going to make me feel better.

I think this has just tipped me over the edge.

My parents dog is not well. This might seem so small to some people but she's the sister to my dog, we got them both at the same time whilst I still lived at home and she's part of the family. She's adorable and unique as every dog is - you don't ever get 2 the same

For a while now their dog has struggled with walking, she's over weight with arthritis and only u years old. It's a catch 22 situation the weight makes the arthritis worse but she can't exercise to lose the weight due to arthritis. The vets were trying to help with injections but it wasn't the best solution and was referred to a vets specialist where they advised that on at least 2 legs they would need to put a metal plate in and fuse the bones together as it was to bad. She had her 1 operation around June time on her back leg... since then she's had to go back 3 times to have screws replaced because they kept getting loose or snapping. She went in for her front leg operating on at the beginning of the month and it seemed to be healing much better, she was using the paw a lot more and it looked really good. On Thursday when she went back in for the 3rd operation on the back leg they raised concerned that something didn't feel right with the front, they could feel something. The vet had a feel and said "it's just the top of the plate there's nothing to worry about". The day after she started limping on her front leg, the day after that she wouldn't put any weight on it at all and she was taken back once again. The vet still said he had no concerns but agreed to scan the leg to put our minds at ease. We'll it turns out the metal plate has snapped in two. They can't remove or add any more screws because her bones are too brittle (a detail they failed to mention prior to the initial operation) and now they don't know what to do, the main surgeon isn't back until Friday and so she had to suffer like this for another week. I dont know what they will do and I'm so scared they will advise that it would be best to PTS....

I'm really struggling to see any positives in my life right now. Obviously positives are- I have a lovely husband, cat and dog, we have our own house, we can pay the bills, we're all healthy etc... but I'm failing to see what positive things have happened in the past few years... we've had 6 family members die, including my father in law unexpectedly at the age of 60, we've suffered from unexplained infertility, we've gone through a round of IVF and failed, my husbands work is not doing too well, my own job isn't safe at the moment and I could be redundant in the new year due to restructures and not enough new roles for the old roles to fill and even if I do get the role I don't think ill be happy with the new expectations of me. I watched my parents have a car accident and now I panic on motorways. My mother in law keeps having episodes where she's just nasty and I don't understand why (is there such thing as a normal mother in law).

I cant think of 1 good thing that's happened to us since covid came into the world.

Photo of the poorly pooch before she had her operations 😔

[nbmsports]

Limiting MLB Draft to 20 Rounds Trades Magic for Efficiency

On Sunday in Seattle, for the fourth year in a row — enough for a full class of college prospects — Major League Baseball will hold a streamlined version of its amateur draft. From an event with unlimited rounds to one with 50 rounds, then 40, and now just 20, the draft is exclusive and efficient, in keeping with baseball’s restructured minor league system.But efficiency has a cost: the countless long-shot careers that may never be realized. Dozens of current major leaguers turned pro after being drafted in rounds that no longer exist. They are grateful for their timing.“Twenty rounds doesn’t seem like quite enough,” said Kevin Kiermaier, the center fielder of the Toronto Blue Jays who was picked in the 31st round by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2010. “I mean, if it was like that now, then I would have never had an opportunity.”Kiermaier, 33, is perhaps the best modern example of the talent that once bubbled far below the surface of the draft. Chosen 941st overall from a community college in Illinois, he has won three Gold Gloves, played in the World Series and earned more than $60 million in an 11-year career.Four players who made the All-Star team last summer — David Bednar, Nestor Cortes, Ty France and Joe Mantiply — were also chosen after the 20th round. So were two members of the Houston Astros’ World Series-clinching lineup last fall (Chas McCormick and Martín Maldonado) and several other longtime major leaguers, like Jesse Chavez, Seth Lugo, Kevin Pillar and Rowdy Tellez.Two Hall of Famers (Mike Piazza and John Smoltz) were drafted in extinct rounds, as were several others with a case for Cooperstown, like Mark Buehrle, Keith Hernandez, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada. Many low-drafted players could have stayed amateurs and tried to improve their draft position the next year — but their careers, of course, would have then unfolded differently.“Cutting the numbers down, you’re going to have to create other opportunities for those kinds of players that would have been drafted to come into the game,” said Omar Minaya, a former general manager and longtime scout who now advises the Yankees. “Players do develop late sometimes, so it’s good that M.L.B. is doing things to put those infrastructures in place.”Starting with the 2021 season, teams have been limited to 180 players under club control — there was no limit before — and four domestic farm teams, plus one or two “complex teams” that operate from the spring training base. Short-season Class A teams were eliminated, partly because of the calendar; in 2021, the league shifted the date of the draft from June to July, to coincide with the All-Star Game and raise its profile.Some teams that were cut are now part of M.L.B.’s predraft league, created for scouts to get one last look at prospects before making their picks. Other teams have joined so-called partner leagues — the American Association, the Atlantic League, the Frontier League and the Pioneer League — partially funded by M.L.B. but independent of any specific franchise.Undrafted players, in theory, can join one of those teams in hopes of attracting interest from M.L.B. But removing them from the draft acknowledges the staggering odds against them.“When a player signs a professional contract, you want that player to have some chance of one day becoming a major league player,” said Morgan Sword, M.L.B.’s executive vice president for baseball operations. “That’s why players become minor league players, because they want to one day become major league players. And we did have a lot of players in the system who had — what’s the right way to say it? — almost no chance of ever reaching the major leagues.”Then again, to paraphrase Jim Carrey in “Dumb and Dumber,” there is a huge difference between almost no chance and no chance. A draft selection — whatever the round — certifies that a major league franchise sees something in a player, and often that is all the player wants.“It was definitely nice to know that they picked me for a reason, and I could get to go show it off and play my game,” said Zach McKinstry, the Detroit Tigers’ regular leadoff hitter, who was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 33rd round in 2016. “I got an opportunity right when I signed. I spent three days in Arizona and then they sent me to low A and I played on a championship team that year.”McKinstry, who played at Central Michigan University, was a backup before a teammate’s injury gave him a chance to elbow his way to the Dodgers. He was keenly aware that most minor leaguers — especially when the draft lasted 40 rounds or more — were needed only so the better prospects had somewhere to play.“There’s a lot of injustice in the game, real or imagined, so there would be a lot of negative thoughts in those scrums in the outfield during batting practice,” said Bob Scanlan, a San Diego Padres broadcaster who pitched nine seasons in the majors after signing as a 25th-round pick in 1984. “There was a lot of talk like: ‘You know you don’t mean anything to this organization. You’re just here as a filler piece. Why are you even working your tail off?’”Scanlan was 17 when he signed with Philadelphia, turning down U.C.L.A. for the allure of the quality coaching he would get in pro ball. In recent decades, though, college programs have become more sophisticated, with advanced facilities and instruction that offered an appealing alternative to the dusty outposts that once made up the low minors.“The development time is less and less with the caps on the total number of players, so the guys you would pick late are probably going to go to college,” said Matt Arnold, the Milwaukee Brewers’ general manager. “Signing and then going to Helena, or wherever, is going to be less appealing than a really nice A.C.C. or SEC school — and even those second-tier programs have a lot of things they can sell.”Sword said the costs of improvements across the minor leagues — in ballparks, travel, nutrition and salaries — far outweigh the savings from eliminating so many draft picks; “it’s probably nine figures per year leaguewide,” he said. Sword added that in 2021, more than 200 players jumped from partner leagues to the affiliated minors.“The paths for those types of guys to the big leagues exist just as they always have,” he said. “It’s just that the path is different than it once was.”Even so, it stands to reason that with half as many draft picks as there were just four years ago, hundreds more players from each class are now giving up their baseball dreams for more realistic careers. Arnold, who grew up in Bakersfield, Calif., rooting for a since-departed Class A team, wonders about the impact of losing so many acolytes for the sport.“A lot of those guys, even if you were a 35th rounder from the middle of nowhere, you go home and you start an academy, and now you’re a hero,” Arnold said. “You’re a guy that played pro ball, and you bring it back home. And maybe he wasn’t great, but he carries the game with him as a steward in a way that I think we’ll miss.”The guys who make it, perhaps, will have to preach a little louder. Kiermaier, for one, embraces the role.“I look back at how everything evolved for me, and I’m so thankful for my journey,” he said. “I’ll never forget that I was a 31st rounder. I’m proud of that. That number means a lot to me.” Source link Read the full article

[getmylife]

T-49 Days ‘til Move In

Completed June 8, 2023

So we got disappointing news this week. There’s been a delay with the tile production for at least two weeks. That is more than a little frustrating, but I’m insisting that July 27th is still Move In Day. It’s in my Reminder List on my to-do list spreadsheet and I’m still speaking and planning with that day in mind. This hold up makes it even more of a miracle in my books.

The other miracle I need is some energy to start cleaning up where we’re at. There’s so much clutter since our last move. I’m sure there are some things still in boxes from 10+ years ago. We need to sort through everything and pack in less than 8 weeks, so I definitely need a lot of energy for that.

Plus, the business restructure goes live and the music camp takes place next month, God willing (a lot happening at once). Jesus will definitely have to put both hands.

In other news, He’s been putting a hand when it comes to some of my anxieties. I’m doing better in terms of germ-related anxiety. I’m so grateful. I could have seen that being a disaster, because it seemed to only be getting worse.

I can’t put my finger on anything I did this week to prep for moving other than visualizing living in my new room. We visited the site today and the stark contrast between no walls to walls everywhere is amazing. The difference between last year this time and now is astounding!

I’m so grateful to God for the resources and this opportunity to move.

#get my life 2023 #productivity #move update #7 more weeks #woot woot

[taisiakat]

June 2023 Energy Reading

Cards: Wisdom of the Hidden Realms

Music: Music of the Angels



The Lady of the Gift (20) Body / Physical / Earth

Generosity, receiving, withholding

With our breath, thought and energy we can create and do create amazing gifts each day of our lives. And we tend to forget that aspect of our lives, that it is US that creates our lives. Yes, the Universe provides the building blocks, the infrastructure, some of the mechanisms, cast and crew, but you are the Director of your life. You are the one that decides how to use these amazing tools to create through your breath, thoughts and energy what you will do and create.

This also means how do you share your creations, gifts and abundance with those around you, to help maintain the flow, expand the energy and support those that need assistance.

Everyday be generous, giving to others through thought, deed and energy in some manner. It does not have to be outlandish, or over the top. It doesn't have to be expensive or just giving money away without a purpose or cause.

No, what it means is bless someone that needs that blessing. Pay attention to how you treat people. A smile, a mindful greeting, a helpful hand, all of these actions make a difference in lives.

But the most important thing you can share is LOVE. Sending love energy to anyone you come in contact with, being mindful of how you perceive them, think about them, focus on them. Do not look at them as in a judgmental state, but of a caring, compassionate state of mind. We all have our own personal demons to wrestle with that are not obvious to others.

Blow rainbow energy kisses out this month. Be light hearted to all you meet with a smile. Give something away to someone who needs it more. Each day, even if it is just 1 hour, 1 person, 1 space, make a difference in a generous and uplifting way.

The more you give the more you will receive.

The Arrow Master (10) Emotions / Feelings / Water

Hitting the mark, intention, detachment

This month your emotions, feelings, the flow of your experiential energetics will be on pointe, hitting your mark, being accurate and attuned to how you want to feel and experience life with.

You will find you will be more in your peace, joy and happiness. You will be more in the moment, feeling these feelings so deeply, filling you as a Spirit/Soul with such wonderful divine purity.

Each time you feel these deep wonderful feelings, stop, be very mindful and express your gratitude for them. Thank those and what is around you that help provide the energy for the experience. Feel that blessing energy throughout your body, letting the energy heal, help, fill you.

With that note, there are some baggage you need to clear out and let go in regards to emotions/feelings in general.

Remind yourself the following:

There are NO BAD (Negative, lower frequency etc.) feelings.

What you feel is real for you.

Other peoples feelings are real to them

Empathy helps us relate to others and how they feel.

Feelings are NOT behaviors.

Learning how to detach from a feeling does not mean you don't feel the feeling. It means learning how to observe the feeling and understand the feeling so you can respond, not react to the feeling.

We live in the 3d world. It is full of wonderful challenges, obstacles, frustrations, things that still will annoy, bother, sadden, depress, bring anxiety, even feeling lonely, isolated.

Learning to let these feelings just be, without controlling them, shunning them, stuffing them down, but breathing through them, acknowledging them, even if you have to say to yourself - I see I am feeling sad right now, do it.

Validating the feeling helps detach. It helps you start to allow it to exist, and acknowledge it, so then you can through different tools isolate, review and restructure the origin of those feelings.

They all start from an experience that we have a thought about.

The Rainbow Prince (26) Mind / Mental / Fire

Compensation, perseverance

You are surrounded by knowledge; Experiences, Community, Collective, Ancestral, Sol, Luna, Planetary, Solar System, Galaxies, Cosmic, Guides, Angelic, Universal, Divine.

Each of these energies have information, knowledge, guidance, to support for your growth, understanding and application of said knowledge so you can experience life here to the fullest possible level. It's right there at your fingertips, available 24/7.

However a lot of us, almost most of us question our understanding, application, even the knowledge itself. We are taught we don't know enough, don't understand enough, not smart enough, were not taught enough to even our knowledge is wrong, incorrect, or bullsh**.

We even give up - if we think we are always wrong.

When we do this, especially questioning our own knowledge, we give up our power, which also includes the ability to learn and expand.

This month, the energy focus is to practice practice, practice and practice more applying what you know, so that state of feeling a novice, or inferior dissipates away. It is also to stop questioning what comes to you, and just apply, and if it is not the answer to solve the situation, practice more.

REMOVE the JUDGMENTS!

It is like playing any instrument, you're going to make mistakes, but over time those mistakes become less and less if you are actively, and mindfully practicing.

Also make sure to thank the Energies that assist you in providing the information, guidance, and or answers. Gratitude goes a long way in keeping the flow going and open.

The Keeper of the Scales (38) Spirit / Spirituality / Air (Higher Purpose / Noble Cause)

Fairness, Balance

Yes, it is vital, important and incredibly powerful to continue your spiritual path, healing, growing, nurturing, vibrating at higher frequencies and flowing love.

BUT sometimes, a lot of time we end up disconnected in a way that is harmful and traumatizing ourselves again - I want to remind you that you are living here in a 3d world, as a body with a spirit. You are not in the 5d world only. The 3d world exists. It happens, sh** happens.

As I was writing out this section, I ran across a post from another spiritualist / amazing witch that I respect and admire a ton.

Dawn Bartos, owner of the New Moon wrote this, which says so elegantly what I wanted to write.

Our responsibility to our spirituality is a large composite for living. When we talk about our higher self we are aware that we are of greater existence and that even more exists for us to tap into for connection. How far are you willing to go before you are no longer grounded in this humanity we have been given? One cannot merely exist in the higher realms constantly. The results lead to a disconnect from reality in all aspects of our lives. Spirituality and reality can live side by side. So many get lost in the euphoria of being in the higher realms, and higher consciousness that others consider them "out there." They begin to psychologically mask their reality and this causes a spiritual spiral because when reality hits, they cannot cope or react appropriately.

If you find yourself in this state, get back to the basics. Check in with yourself and become aware of the moment you are in. Balancing your spirituality, relying on it to help with your life's actions and decisions is proper, however...

Spirituality is not an escape and should never be abused as such.

Ground yourself and come back to this life!

The other aspect we must be fair to others. Do not judge others where they are in their journey. For the path they have is theirs to walk.

We are all here in the 3d universe to experience, to grow, to learn, to love. It is imperative that you remember you were not as aware as you are now.

Everyone is on their own schedule, their own clock, their own time.

This isn't a race. We all have something to work out. We all have our own healing to do.

Have fun with this month's Energy and the Energy of the Solstice that is also present in this month.

Please feel free to ask any questions, share your thoughts, let me know how I can assist you.

=================

I offer written individual Full Moon, New Moon, Monthly, and weekly readings if you are interested. Contact me for more information.

@}}>`~~~ Experience, observe, be curious and enjoy!

The Last Chance Crone - helping you with your shit when other methods fail.

#monthly reading #oraclereading #oraclecards #monthly energy #energy reading #june 2023 #June reading #lastchancecrone #last chance crone

[mariacallous]

Editor's Note: The debt limit is once again an issue for political debate about federal spending. In this FixGov blog series, we’ve asked a number of experts to explain, why it’s so hard to cut federal spending?

For the next few months, as we head into the debt ceiling negotiations, we will be thrust into a familiar argument about deficits and government spending. Both parties appear to have taken social security and Medicare off the table. Ditto for defense. So, all there is left to talk about is the discretionary side of the budget — a measly 14% of the total budget in 2019.

Getting significant savings out of this part of the budget will be like getting blood from a stone. Is there some fraud and waste in there? Sure — but, as Donald Kettl has pointed out you need to spend money to find it. Are there things in there that don’t need to be done at the federal level? Sure, but even if you can get past the stubborn status quo, this requires the hard work of restructuring. Can taxes be raised, and tax expenditures be cut? Of course they can, but raising taxes is heresy for the Republican Party and cutting tax expenditures (such as the mortgage interest deduction) is Defcon 4 for the public.

While we don’t know what the Republican counter to Biden’s budget proposal looks like (and it may not be out until June) we do know that it may include a cap on future agency budgets — the equivalent of across-the-board cuts to the non-defense discretionary side of the budget. A little bit of history provides a good lesson in why across the board cuts are perhaps the worst way to cut spending.

The story starts in 2010 when Republicans had just taken control of the House of Representatives and Barack Obama was president. Due to spending as a result of the Great Recession, deficits were high, and Republicans were threatening to increase the debt ceiling unless large cuts in federal spending were made. The Budget Control Act set up a congressional committee — called the “Super Committee” — to come up with a bipartisan package of cuts. To no one’s surprise, it failed and an automatic “sequester” kicked in requiring 2% across the board cuts starting in January 2013.

As agencies began to comply with the sequester everyone — including the Republican Congress — got a hard lesson in why across the board cuts are a bad idea. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) runs the nation’s airports including over 21,000 air traffic controllers.

Their budget is appropriated in accounts, the biggest being “operations” mostly air traffic controllers and other safety related personnel. To implement the law the FAA required air traffic controllers to take unpaid furloughs. To keep everyone safe the FAA also implemented programs that increased aircraft spacing which of course sparked delays and reduced the number of flights that could be handled in any given period. This led to serious disruptions in New York City, Dallas-Fort Worth, Las Vegas, Chicago and Tampa airports, among others. By the fifth day of furloughs 863 flights had been delayed and another 2,132 were expected.

The public was outraged and let legislators, reporters, and their friends and acquaintances know. On April 27, 2013, just days into the furloughs, Congress passed legislation allowing the FAA to transfer money from the airport improvement account into the operations account and the furloughs ended. The bill was named the “Reducing Flight Delays Act of 2013,” the air traffic controllers went back to work and received their pay. And the portion of the budget that went to airport improvement grants was moved into a “protected” status so that airports could use them in the later years of their eligibility.

The moral of the story is that there’s a wrong way to cut government spending and a right way that almost is never used. That involves good faith negotiations between political parties, a willingness to compromise on each side’s respective priorities, and serious efforts to locate unworthy expenditures. As Congressman Barney Frank used to say, “a willingness to look for fat in the budget involves the way you look for fat in a nicely marbled piece of steak.” That is taking out a sharp knife and going after clear pockets of pork. It’s no coincidence that the last time the U.S. had a balanced budget was at the beginning of the information technology revolution. The creative use of new technology in this century could also result in savings as could investigating the devolution of some functions from the federal government to state and local governments.

The wrong way is the easy way — simply lop off a certain amount across the board. Hence the wrong way wins. Let’s hope it doesn’t win this time too.

[365elephantsoap]

DEHYDRATION

In the dark morning hours of Sunday, I dreamed that I was at a spa for a spa day. That’s not a far fetch dream. Michael got me a gift card for a spa day for Christmas and I’m all booked for the twenty first. In this dream, I went into a room that was very hospital like and removed my clothes. Then I peed on the floor (because dreams are crazy). My massage therapist then told me to lie down on the massage table face up. She covered me with blankets and then raised the bars up on both sides of the table. The table turned out to be a hospital bed. Then she spent five minutes digging for a vein in my hand so that she could hook me up to a saline IV. The therapist patted my other hand and said “We’re just going to let you rest here for a few minutes and absorb some fluids.” Then she pulled a curtain around me and left me alone.

I woke up thinking that I really needed to drink more water.

I also really hope that this is not how my actual spa day is going to play out.

Oh, it must be that time of year when I have to be reminded to care for myself. I’m not talking about massages and bubble baths kind of care, but the basics. Drink water. Trim nails. Eat a green vegetable. Step away from the cheese. That last on is much harder than it sounds. Months ago I told Michael I wanted a cheese cake for my birthday. He replied “Oh, you want me to make you a cheesecake for your birthday?” and I said “No. I want a cake made out of wheels of cheese for my birthday.” Then Michael said “What?! Is that a thing?!” while googling it and discovering that yes it is a thing. The first layer is already sitting in the fridge because it was on sale at Whole Foods during Christmas. It didn’t hit me until I made our New Year’s Eve charcuterie board that I had asked for an exorbitant amount of cheese.

We will be freezing leftover birthday cheese cake.

I still stand one hundred percent behind my beliefs that making resolutions in January is a waste of time. No one is in a good headspace to start new projects or pick up the old projects. We’re all still recovering from our holiday gatherings and the clean up from those holiday gatherings. I started the New Year with yet another restructuring at work. It’s nothing bad, in fact it is a very good thing, but there’s a lot of new things and questions and weirdness. I’m losing my yoga space and I’m going to have to hunt down a new one. I thought this week, I’d work on consistency in my yoga practice, my walks and going back to torture class. I’m saying no to elevators and I’ve re-introduced a timed twenty minute eating time.

I’ve also had a liter and a half of water today.

I’m not setting any big goals for myself this year because some big goals have already been established for me. A manager of a downtown coffee place posted a request for local artists in a private Facebook group that Michael is part of. He sent her a link to my website and she contacted me last week about a May/June showing for my photography. I’ve been scared to say anything about it because the last time I was supposed to do something like this, the world shut down and I lost my commission. Also, it didn’t really feel legit since I didn’t do anything. She just went online and looked at my photography page. All I had to do was say ‘yes’. I confirmed the dates with the manager yesterday and I’ll go visit the space on Saturday, but I feel like I have all the photos I need to fill the walls. I just need to print and frame them.

I start to get a little bit hyperventally when I think about it, but then I remember all the preparation I’ve already done and how there is not that much left for me to do other than just print the pictures. Maybe if someone came to me and said “hey, we want to publish your book in October.”, I’d finish writing a book. Apparently this how I get things accomplished. I just need to set back and do nothing until someone tells me to do something.

Drink some water. Eat a green vegetable.

#goals #photography #self care

[tmbgareok]

Hello everyone. Finally we have some very good news! We have rescheduled all of our Spring 2022 shows. The new batch of shows begin in New York City in June and run all the way to May 2023 (proving that 2020 is the first year to last for three!). Dates for all the rescheduled gigs are below, and ALL tickets purchased so long ago will be honored at the door.

If you are going to a show in New York City, Washington DC, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Seattle or Portland, OR please look VERY CAREFULLY AT THE GRAPHIC as we are playing sold out shows MULTIPLE NIGHTS in these towns. Your GA ticket will still only get you into one specific rescheduled show. We’ve all come this far! Don’t get confused now!

If you have questions or are unable to attend, please talk directly to the box office of the venue.

All of these shows are very much SOLD OUT except the 5 with ticket links!

2022 6/8 New York City 6/9 Washington DC 6/10 Washington DC 6/11 Washington DC 6/12 Baltimore 6/16 Philadelphia 6/17 New York City 6/18 New York City 6/19 New York City

8/30 Asbury Park 8/31 Asbury Park

9/1 Portsmouth 9/2 Portland ME https://bit.ly/3yXbt98 9/3 North Adams MA https://bit.ly/3ihypKr 9/15 Boston 9/16 Boston 9/17 Burlington VT 9/18 Northampton 9/20 Pawling 9/21 Ithaca 9/22 Buffalo 9/23 Pittsburgh 9/24 Pittsburgh 9/25 New York City

10/11 Cleveland 10/12 Cleveland 10/13 Chicago 10/14 Minneapolis 10/15 St. Paul 10/16 St. Louis     2023     4/13 San Diego 4/14 Los Angeles 4/16 Oakland 4/18 Portland OR 4/19 Portland OR 4/20 Seattle 4/21 Seattle 4/22 Vancouver

5/10 Salt Lake City 5/11 Denver 5/12 Boulder 5/13 Fort Collins 5/14 Lincoln 5/16 Kansas City MO 5/18 Tulsa https://bit.ly/34KmoW1 5/19 Dallas 5/20 Houston https://livemu.sc/3uOVeaR 5/21 Austin https://bit.ly/3vKOsEl

A TMBG FAQ

“Why did you move your shows?"

After some long discussions with our management and booking agent, we realized we could not maintain a consistently safe environment for two-plus months as a traveling band and crew this spring. In rescheduling to this summer, fall, and beyond we believe we have addressed many of the issues to get us safely and smartly back on the road.

Our plan for the rescheduling of these 43 shows is to break them up into shorter chunks with time off in between chunks to preserve the viability of scheduled shows in general. Our previous plan relied on everything going perfectly across the US and within our touring group for months at a time. Traveling for shorter, more regional stretches will create a touring scenario where if things were to go sideways, either in a region affected by a variant or within the walls of our tour bus, individual shows can be made up in due course without restructuring the entire run of a tour.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Machine learning's crumbling foundations

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Even people who write secure code import insecure libraries, or plug it into insecure authorization systems or databases. Like asbestos in the walls, this cruft has been fragmenting, drifting into our air a crumb at a time.

We ignored these, treating them as containable, little breaches and now the walls are rupturing and choking clouds of toxic waste are everywhere.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

The infosec apocalypse was decades in the making. The machine learning apocalypse, on the other hand…

ML has serious, institutional problems, the kind of thing you’d expect in a nascent discipline, which you’d hope would be worked out before it went into wide deployment.

ML is rife with all forms of statistical malpractice — AND it’s being used for high-speed, high-stakes automated classification and decision-making, as if it was a proven science whose professional ethos had the sober gravitas you’d expect from, say, civil engineering.

Civil engineers spend a lot of time making sure the buildings and bridges they design don’t kill the people who use them. Machine learning?

Hundreds of ML teams built models to automate covid detection, and every single one was useless or worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

The ML models failed due to failure to observe basic statistical rigor. One common failure mode?

Treating data that was known to be of poor quality as if it was reliable because good data was not available.

Obtaining good data and/or cleaning up bad data is tedious, repetitive grunt-work. It’s unglamorous, time-consuming, and low-waged. Cleaning data is the equivalent of sterilizing surgical implements — vital, high-skilled, and invisible unless someone fails to do it.

It’s work performed by anonymous, low-waged adjuncts to the surgeon, who is the star of the show and who gets credit for the success of the operation.

The title of a Google Research team (Nithya Sambasivan et al) paper published in ACM CHI beautifully summarizes how this is playing out in ML: “Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI,”

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf

The paper analyzes ML failures from a cross-section of high-stakes projects (health diagnostics, anti-poaching, etc) in East Africa, West Africa and India. They trace the failures of these projects to data-quality, and drill into the factors that caused the data problems.

The failures stem from a variety of causes. First, data-gathering and cleaning are low-waged, invisible, and thankless work. Front-line workers who produce the data — like medical professionals who have to do extra data-entry — are not compensated for extra work.

Often, no one even bothers to explain what the work is for. Some of the data-cleaning workers are atomized pieceworkers, such as those who work for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who lack both the context in which the data was gathered and the context for how it will be used.

This data is passed to model-builders, who lack related domain expertise. The hastily labeled X-ray of a broken bone, annotated by an unregarded and overworked radiologist, is passed onto a data-scientist who knows nothing about broken bones and can’t assess the labels.

This is an age-old problem in automation, pre-dating computer science and even computers. The “scientific management” craze that started in the 1880s saw technicians observing skilled workers with stopwatches and clipboards, then restructuring the workers’ jobs by fiat.

Rather than engaging in the anthropological work that Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” the management “scientists” discarded workers’ qualitative experience, then treated their own assessments as quantitative and thus empirical.

http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm

How long a task takes is empirical, but what you call a “task” is subjective. Computer scientists take quantitative measurements, but decide what to measure on the basis of subjective judgment. This empiricism-washing sleight of hand is endemic to ML’s claims of neutrality.

In the early 2000s, there was a movement to produce tools and training that would let domain experts produce their own tools — rather than delivering “requirements” to a programmer, a bookstore clerk or nurse or librarian could just make their own tools using Visual Basic.

This was the radical humanist version of “learn to code” — a call to seize the means of computation and program, rather than being programmed. Over time, it was watered down, and today it lives on as a weak call for domain experts to be included in production.

The disdain for the qualitative expertise of domain experts who produce data is a well-understood guilty secret within ML circles, embodied in Frederick Jelinek’s ironic talk, “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”

But a thick understanding of context is vital to improving data-quality. Take the American “voting wars,” where GOP-affiliated vendors are brought in to purge voting rolls of duplicate entries — people who are registered to vote in more than one place.

These tools have a 99% false-positive rate.

Ninety. Nine. Percent.

To understand how they go so terribly wrong, you need a thick understanding of the context in which the data they analyze is produced.

https://5harad.com/papers/1p1v.pdf

The core assumption of these tools is that two people with the same name and date of birth are probably the same person.

But guess what month people named “June” are likely to be born in? Guess what birthday is shared by many people named “Noel” or “Carol”?

Many states represent unknown birthdays as “January 1,” or “January 1, 1901.” If you find someone on a voter roll whose birthday is represented as 1/1, you have no idea what their birthday is, and they almost certainly don’t share a birthday with other 1/1s.

But false positives aren’t evenly distributed. Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names.

This is likewise true of the descendants of colonized and enslaved people, whose surnames were assigned to them for administrative purposes and see a high degree of overlap. When you see two voter rolls with a Juan Gomez born on Jan 1, you need to apply thick analysis.

Unless, of course, you don’t care about purging the people who are most likely to face structural impediments to voter registration (such as no local DMV office) and who are also likely to be racialized (for example, migrants whose names were changed at Ellis Island).

ML practitioners don’t merely use poor quality data when good quality data isn’t available — they also use the poor quality data to assess the resulting models. When you train an ML model, you hold back some of the training data for assessment purposes.

So maybe you start with 10,000 eye scans labeled for the presence of eye disease. You train your model with 9,000 scans and then ask the model to assess the remaining 1,000 scans to see whether it can make accurate classifications.

But if the data is no good, the assessment is also no good. As the paper’s authors put it, it’s important to “catch[] data errors using mechanisms specific to data validation, instead of using model performance as a proxy for data quality.”

ML practitioners studied for the paper — practitioners engaged in “high-stakes” model building reported that they had to gather their own data for their models through field partners, “a task which many admitted to being unprepared for.”

High-stakes ML work has inherited a host of sloppy practices from ad-tech, where ML saw its first boom. Ad-tech aims for “70–75% accuracy.”

That may be fine if you’re deciding whether to show someone an ad, but it’s a very different matter if you’re deciding whether someone needs treatment for an eye-disease that, untreated, will result in irreversible total blindness.

Even when models are useful at classifying input produced under present-day lab conditions, those conditions are subject to several kinds of “drift.”

For example, “hardware drift,” where models trained on images from pristine new cameras are asked to assess images produced by cameras from field clinics, where lenses are impossible to keep clean (see also “environmental drift” and “human drift”).

Bad data makes bad models. Bad models instruct people to make ineffective or harmful interventions. Those bad interventions produce more bad data, which is fed into more bad models — it’s a “data-cascade.”

GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — was already a bedrock of statistical practice before the term was coined in 1957. Statistical analysis and inference cannot proceed from bad data.

Producing good data and validating data-sets are the kind of unsexy, undercompensated maintenance work that all infrastructure requires — and, as with other kinds of infrastructure, it is undervalued by journals, academic departments, funders, corporations and governments.

But all technological debts accrue punitive interest. The decision to operate on bad data because good data is in short supply isn’t like looking for your car-keys under the lamp-post — it’s like driving with untrustworthy brakes and a dirty windscreen.

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#pluralistic

[clouds-of-wings]

[During the press conference that followed our private talk], it was déjà vu. More specifically, it was Paris all over again. Gabriel was a changed man. Once again a European social democrat attempted to out-Schäuble Schäuble in public. All the talk about a joint social democratic project for Greece and Europe vanished. The common ground we had established on industrial policy, ending austerity and debt restructuring gave way beneath my feet. The meeting of minds regarding strategies for tackling tax evasion evaporated. All was replaced with aggression towards my government and a harsh lecture on my obligations to our creditors, which were paramount and beyond negotiation. To add insult to injury, he added a reference to the troika’s ‘flexibility’.

With my by-now outstandingly low expectations of Europe’s social democrats further downgraded by my previous night’s experience with Jörg and Jeromin, I continued unperturbed and gave my standard spiel about our government’s quest for sustainability by means of moderate proposals to recalibrate radically the troika’s failed Greek programme. But as we were leaving the press room, I asked Sigmar how easy it was for him to say one thing in private and quite another in public. ‘It is something that I’m finding very hard,’ I added.

He claimed not to understand what I was referring to but did say that being in coalition with the Christian Democrats was constraining. I responded that he should learn the lesson of PASOK, the Greek social democratic party, which had had a similar habit of adapting their narrative to suit their coalitionwith the New Democracy conservatives. ‘They crashed from 40 per cent to 4 per cent. I would not want to see the party of Willy Brandt go the same way’ were my last words to him.

A month later I proposed to the ‘institutions’ the idea of Greece’s tax department employing outside personnel in an attempt to shift Greek social norms away from habitual petty tax evasion – just as I had discussed with Sigmar Gabriel that day. This was just one of many reforms to the tax office that I put forward, the most important being enforced digitization of transactions and a limit of fifty euros on cash dealings. Troika officials leaked the proposal to the press, which went to town. Instead of the serious reforms demanded by the troika (such as raising VAT rates in a broken economy where people evaded VAT), I was portrayed as putting forward foolish proposals involving wired-up tourists and housewives encouraging Greeks to snitch on their neighbours.

Did Sigmar Gabriel or any in his circle defend the proposal that he had seemed so keen to see me implement? The answer may not surprise you. If anything, his office helped spread the propaganda. If anyone wonders about the nature and causes of the general Waterloo now facing European social democracy, this story may provide some clues. Of course, compared to the way Sigmar Gabriel was to behave four months later, during the last week of June 2015, this change of heart does not even register on the Richter scale of cowardice.

-- Yanis Varoufakis: Adults in the Room

#☕️☕️☕️ #yanis varoufakis #adults in the room #sigmar gabriel #spd #ROAST HIM GURL #ROAST HIM LIKE AN UNSAVOURY COFFEE BEAN #oh i can't wait for june