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disneytva · 11 months

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20th Television Animation Showcases First Simpsons-less San Diego Comic Con Schedule

With the WGA currently picketing and a looming SAG-AFTRA strike already impacting San Diego Comic-Con with several Disney divisions skipping the convention (Marvel Studios,Lucasfilm Entertaiment,Disney Television Animation) However, here’s a glimpse at the schedule of the convention.

Some shows have promised cast appearances, but that’s still TBD given that the SAG-AFTRA contract expires on July 12, and actors aren’t permitted to promote their wares during a work stoppage.

For the first time ever the hit animated prime-time comedy "The Simpsons" will skip the convention as the crew of the show wants to stay soliditary with the WAG strike and SAG strike as the show is under the WAG.

Thursday, July 20

FX’s Archer: 14th & Final Season Exclusive Screening and Q&A:

Archer returns in advance of its upcoming 14th and final season, premiering August 30 on FXX. Includes screening of the season opener and additional surprises.

Ballroom 20, 5:45 p.m.

Friday, July 21

Solar Opposites

The show packs up the sci-fi and gets normal . . . for a second. Then it’s back to classic Solar chaos, mayhem in the Wall, and some all-new Silvercops adventures. Join the aliens for a hilarious and out-of-this-world first look at the upcoming fourth season on Hulu.

Hilton Indigo Ballroom, 3PM.

The Great North

The Tobins are back at Comic-Con. Join your favorite Lone Moose family for a hilarious look at their outrageous Alaskan adventures on The Great North, ahead of its fourth season on FOX.

Hilton Indigo Ballroom, 4PM.

Bob’s Burgers:

The Emmy Award–winning animated series returns to Comic-Con with an exciting first look at an upcoming episode before the series returns to FOX this fall.

Hilton Indigo Ballroom 5PM.

Saturday, July 22

“Futurama”

You won’t want to miss the world premiere screening of the beloved sci-fi animated series “Futurama” before new episodes debut on Hulu on July 24. After a 10-year hiatus, “Futurama” has sprung triumphantly from the cryogenic tube, its full original cast and satirical spirit intact.

(Ballroom 20) 11AM

“American Dad!”

Emmy Award–winning animated comedy “American Dad!” is back in action at Comic-Con for another year! Don’t miss all the fun that the Smith family has in store before all-new episodes return to TBS this fall.

(Ballroom 20) 12PM

“Family Guy”

Award-winning and fan-favorite series, “Family Guy” returns to Comic-Con for another iconic year. Join in on the Griffin family fun as they celebrate one of the longest-running shows on television, with over 400 episodes and more all-new episodes coming to Fox this fall. (Ballroom 20) 12:45PM

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andradrawsstuff · 4 days

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Meet my OCs ✨

The story is set in November 2021 and onwards, so that’s why the ages might look a little off at first

Robin is Korean/American and uses both first and middle names, but mostly uses Robin because its easier to pronounce and shorter

He’s bi and autistic

He also has 3 horses

Henri (shortened version) is Cuban/Jamaican

She is audhd (inattentive rather than hyperactive)

She has a degree in mechanical engineering and plays guitar like a pro 🎸

Amanda is married to Robin and Han’s mom

She is a 50 year old gamer ✨pop off queen

People always ask Conner if he’s from Cyberlife (I wonder why? 🤔)

He has a boyfriend called Griffin, who he currently lives with

He loves to make fun of the millennials in the group when they’re being cringe

Han is also Korean/American

He’s a bit of a beige millennial…

He’s also trans masc and pan

Bro never skips arm day

Parisha is Pakistani

Her and Han are seeing each other 👀

She loves to read… certain books

She’s a little… off

Macie joins later in 2022 ✨

She also puts the H in ADHD

She’s aroace

Killian is autistic (probably where Robin gets it from)

Uh… he ain’t a great guy ngl

But everyone thinks he was and only a few people know the truth 🫢

Some background info and lore:

They work for the FBI under the criminal investigative division

They generally solve more violent and serious crimes and aid cops and NCIS

They also have to deal with a lot of corruption within their organisation *I wonder who cough cough*

A running joke between them is that the FBI crammed all the minority groups into one office to give the illusion of diversity, since the FBI is predominantly made up of straight white men

The story inspired by Bones and Brooklyn 99

I’m currently working on writing and developing the story :3

I sometimes make small comics of them too✨

#oc #oc art #character sheet #character design #own story #ocs #original character #original charater art #oc artwork #oc artist #oc art dump #original art #character info #it’s like 4am when I’m posting this so sorry for any weird spellings or words 💀

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spacetimewithstuartgary · 2 months

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NASA's VIPER robotic moon rover team raises its mighty mast

NASA's VIPER—short for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover—now stands taller and more capable than ever, thanks to its mast.

VIPER's mast, and the suite of instruments affixed to it, looks a lot like the rover's "neck" and "head." The mast instruments are designed to help the team of rover drivers and real-time scientists send commands and receive data while the rover navigates around hazardous crater slopes, boulders, and places that risk communications blackouts. The team will use these instruments, along with four science payloads, to scout the lunar South Pole.

During its approximately 100-day mission, VIPER seeks to better understand the origin of water and other resources on the moon, as well as the extreme environment where NASA plans to send astronauts as part of the Artemis campaign.

The tip of VIPER's mast stands approximately eight feet (2.5 meters) above its wheel rims and is equipped with a pair of stereo navigation cameras, a pair of powerful LED headlights, as well as a low- and high-gain antenna to transmit data to and receive data from the Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas on Earth.

The stereo navigation cameras—the "eyes" of the rover—are mounted to a part of the mast that gimbals, allowing the team to pan them as much as 400 degrees around and tilt them up and down as much as 75 degrees.

The VIPER team will use the navigation cameras to take sweeping panoramas of the rover's surroundings and images to detect and further study surface features such as rocks and craters as small as four inches (10 cm) in diameter—or about the length of a pencil—from as far as 50 feet (15 meters) away. Because the navigation cameras are mounted up high, it gives the VIPER team a near human-like perspective as the rover explores areas of scientific interest around the moon's south pole.

Due to the extremes of light and darkness found on the moon, VIPER will be the first planetary rover to have headlights. The headlights will cast a narrow, long-distance beam—much like a car's high beams—to help the team reveal obstacles or interesting terrain features that would otherwise stay hidden in the shadows. Positioned next to the rover's two navigation cameras, the lights feature arrays of blue LEDs that the rover navigation team determined would provide the best visibility, given the challenging lighting conditions on the moon.

In order to transmit large amounts of data across the 240,000 miles (384,000 km) that separate Earth and the moon, VIPER has a gimballing precision-pointed, high-gain antenna that will send information along a very focused, narrow beam. Its low-gain antenna also will send data, but using radio waves at a much lower data rate.

The ability for the antennas to maintain the correct orientation, even while driving, serves a critical function: without it, the rover cannot receive commands while in motion on the moon and cannot transmit any of its data back to Earth for scientists to achieve their mission goals. All that data is then transferred from the DSN to the Multi-Mission Operations and Control Center at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, where rover operations are based.

Prior to installation on the rover, engineers put the mast through a variety of testing. This included time in a thermal vacuum chamber to verify hat tthe white coating surrounding the mast insulates as intended. After the mast's integration in the clean room at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the team also successfully performed checkouts of its components, and for the first time sent data through the rover using its antennas.

VIPER is part of the Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program and is managed by the Planetary Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. VIPER will launch to the moon aboard Astrobotic's Griffin lunar lander on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. It will reach its destination at Mons Mouton near the moon's south pole.

TOP IMAGE....A team of engineers lifts the mast into place atop of NASA’s VIPER robotic Moon rover in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Credit: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas

LOWER IMAGE....NASA’s VIPER robotic Moon rover stands taller than ever after engineers integrated its mast in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

#science #space #astronomy #physics #news #nasa #astrophysics

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beardedmrbean · 4 months

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ATLANTA (WANF/Gray News) - A Georgia high school football coach was arrested after allegedly killing his girlfriend in Maryland on Saturday, according to Prince George’s County Police Department,

Carl Kearney, Jr., 43, walked into the Division V Clinton police station and confessed to officers that he had strangled his girlfriend earlier that morning at her home, authorities said.

Kearney is the head football coach at Spalding High School in Griffin, Georgia.

The victim, identified as 38-year-old Patrina Best, was found unresponsive by officers who responded to the home for a welfare check. She was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.

During questioning by detectives, Kearney admitted to strangling Best during an altercation.

Kearney faces charges of first- and second-degree murder along with related offenses.

#nunyas news

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military1st · 5 months

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Soldiers from the Bundeswehr's Rapid Response Forces Division perform a scouting mission during the NATO exercise GREEN GRIFFIN 21 at Lehnin, Germany.

The U.S. Army photo by Michele Wiencek (2021).

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agentsquirrelsgotrobots · 10 months

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@gelu-the-babosa-multiversal @kandicon

Wc: probably around 2-3k words. Sorry in advance.

When Optimus prayed for the cybertronian race to recover and repopulate, he didn't mean this.

He was woken up at midnight to Ratchet practically launching himself out of bed and out the door, a hissed command to go back to bed keeping him from running after his conjunx.

He wished Ratchet had rushed faster when he learned about what was so important that morning.

A pair of split spark twins caught in mid division was found in a tiny hot spot on Griffin Rock. They survived but merged back together, too weak to survive apart.

The prognosis was good, however, but Blades' reports of seeing a pair of strange and severely injured black and white creatures before having to drop everything to dust off his spark preserver and rush to save the fragile sparks.

Ratchet was at a loss. He steeled himself to the idea that the twins could be the rare techno-organic, and his training would barely be effective in the event of a critical emergency.

However, they were starting to diverge again, and this time, it looked like he would be tending to two sparks soon enough. He heard Blades come back from a call out and decided to get a quick nap on a cot next to the spark incubator he had brought with him.

Blades wasn't expecting to hear tapping coming from the inside of the incubator. At first, he just thought the old equipment just needed some maintenance.

Then black goo started to seep out of the seams and pool in the inside of the airtight incubator. That was when he woke up Ratchet.

The spark was gone.

In its place was a writhing mass of half formed limbs and two heads of white hair, their blue eyes flickering with sickly green light.

Long pointed ears were shoved into each other's mouths like makeshift pacifiers, and as Ratchet approached, a pair of intelligent eyes spotted him. A tiny fist, no bigger than Cody's, was waved in his direction, and Ratchet waved back before checking the camera feed and vitals. Boulder had relieved Blades long enough to get energon for the two medics, and on camera, Ratchet watched the spark start oozing black goo and two tiny skulls and spines plopped out, the bones sinking into the goo. The spark finally split and absorbed into the goo, the skulls floating back into view with glazed over eyes and a head of hair, a thin layer of skin barely visible against the bone.

Their vitals were much stronger than Ratchet was expecting, and he made a note to himself to give the two of them a physical exam by the end of the week.

It seemed that it was a set of male/female twins, just based on the barely skinned organs Ratchet could see in the goop. The more active one was male, and the female, whose vitals suggested she was still in an initial developmental stasis, was currently trying to bury itself into the good in its sleep, her brother using her body as a step stool not helping much.

Ratchet took a few samples of the black goo but already had an idea of what he would find. The creatures were humanoid techno-organics, likely monoformers, and shouldn't be taller than Ratchet's knee at the most. He went back to bed and told Blades that around the clock monitoring is no longer needed.

That morning, more tapping, and the sounds of palms hitting the incubator glass.

The twins were much bigger now, close to outgrowning their incubator. Both beings were growing around the same rate, and their vitals were strong, so Ratchet had Boulder come over so he could give them both their first physical.

Boulder cradled the female in his hand, cooing as she stretched and her tail lengthened, giving her his pinky to hold onto as she struggled to sit up without legs. She started to squeak and babble, the sounds becoming more and more complex as she and her twins speed ran the first eighteen months of human development while Boulder and Ratchet watched, thankful that they had the thought to install a camera for the duration of the appointment for later.

Instead of sending footage of cute techno-organic pups, it was watching the two being grow up right in front of them.

They stopped growing just around twenty months of age, the male twin already demonstrating that they already had a range of vocabulary by noisily rambling about Boulder's alt mode (he guessed by his feet, but Ratchet was quick to reward his attempts to talk)

They set the two of them down on a blanket, Boulder cleaning the incubator while Ratchet sat with the twins and watched them in the playpen Dani dug out of storage as a joke but forgot to put away.

"M-mister?" Dani squeaked, adorably tripping over her Ts and Rs, the Rs being replaced with a D sound. "Wha-What's you-ya-your na-n-name?" She said to Ratchet, who had traded the two with Boulder.

"My name is Ratchet. Do you have a name, little ones?"

"Da- da-dan-danny. With a Y." Danny was laying on his back, trying to catch his tail.

"Hey! My name is Dani too. No, not exactly. There's a little more? Dani-el? Danielle? No, I don't like that. Da-ni-el-lle. El. Ellie! Ellie, that's my name! Danny, Danny, I figured it out! We are Dannies!"

"DannyDaniDan-niDa-ni-el-le," the two of them chanted. Danny rolled around on his bum and let out a surprised squeak when he was able to roll himself into a kneel without touching the ground. Ellie leaned forward, her tain splitting into legs, and got onto her knees too, and had to grab her as she nearly maimed her brother with tiny white retractable claws that Ratchet could barely see as she fell forward.

Ratchet helped her balance on her feet, surprised as she took a few wobbly steps before crawling back to her brother.

"Da-ny! Did ya see! I did it!"

"Do you know how you got here?" Boulder asked. He didn't think through the question well, but Dani didn't really care. She just wanted to talk.

"Well, Danny's core got broken and I got all melty so we fused each ot-her to-get-her so we can get back to Jazzy but then we fell in a portal and now we are here with yooooooooouuuuuu."

Dani was fading fast, and she sat down and laid down, drifting back to sleep. Danny crawled on top of her and stuffed his head into her hair, his body relaxing into sleep a few minutes later.

Ratchet woke up to Danny wailing, Ellie thankfully still asleep.

"Ratch! I know! I know! They gone ratch, they gone and -and bloody- and crying" Danny was sobbing, he had grown to be about eight overnight. Ratchet scooped up the child and walked into the main garage area, hoping that a walk might get the inconsolable boy back to sleep.

"Ra-ratch, they took em! They-they took em and lined em up and shot em one by one. First-First ma-mommy, then daddy-jacko, then - then- then JAZZZZZZZZZZZZY!"

Ratchet grunted as a supernatural shock wave assaulted his ears. "Danny, Danny, please, you are going to wake up the whole house. If you can calm down, and-"

"No but- but listen, then they burned-did dem with a fwame fwower and- and then then they sh-shot Dani and-and then I got all sad and - and my core got broke and - and then Clocky brought us here 'cause we need a st-sta-stable core to s-su-suvive, and this place had four! He said he would come back for us w-once we are st-stable." Ratchet could hear the sound of glass cracking, and quickly set Danny back with his sister. He knew from treating other split spark twins that the cracks in Danny's spark would heal with close contact with Ellie's. Danny curled up around his twin, and fell into a fitful sleep.

The first time Danny was allowed near the humans, of course, went horribly.

"No no no, no, noooooooo! No touch, no touch, that's how they got emmmmmm!" Danny screeched, floating out of Charlie's attempts to wipe away some of the inky gunk on his face, leftovers from crying. "I don't wanna let the guys in white n vans got you toooooooo. It's not illegal, you knowwwww."

"What do you mean by illegal? Can you sight the specific section where the killing of techno-organics is legal?"

"No, silly, we aren't tech-techno- or-organ-nicks. We are ghosties!"

"Ghost!" Ellie squeaked. She hadn't aged a day past three.

"Killing us is legal in Ar-kan-saw-us, Wis-wits-con-sin, and Ill-lon-now cause the Ec-Ect-Ecto-Acts." Danny explained, taking an offered juice box from Dani and slurping it loudly.

"The Ectoplasmic Entities Act? I thought it dealt with specialised hazardous waste in a few towns in the Midwest?"

"No, it's for mur-Der. Like- like Ellie's bwothers and sithsters. They got all melty like popsicles and-and I couldn't get them to to stay together. I could only fixed-ded Ellie, and she almost got melty too, but I souped' her and brought 'er to Frostbite and Clocky and they helped her with my help and then she went on a trip a'round the woooorrrld." Danny spun around with his arms outstretched to show the big grown ups and the human grown-ups how big the world was. He pouted when he slipped and fell on his bum, his bad mood lifted by the firefighter giving him candy and a red fire helmet and then the helicopter grown up let him watch TV with him.

After the apparently legal nature of the reason the two children were almost killed, Ratchet finally called his husband.

Optimus bowed his head respectively to the being currently cradling Ellie. He had arrived to the firehouse, reached out hold an adorable heap of cuddly ecto-entity, and got foiled by a being that radiated pure, ancient power.

He was still kinda mad that he didn't get to hold Ellie, considering she preferred her squishy, wriggly ghost form.

Optimus may be millions of years old, but this being in front of him was Ancient.

Time is like that, you know.

Supposedly, it, space, and matter had been born before Primus was even a thought.

The Matrix practically forced Optimus to bow to Time and his wards, the ghosts of balance, one with a meaning, an obsession, with travel and freedom, and one with protection and loyalty.

Optimus knew that he would have to yield to beings unique to humans, but to actually put that knowledge into practice, to know that he was an intruder, a guest in a supernatural sphere of influence, and his connection to the Matrix could leave him vulnerable to their power?

A chilling idea indeed.

But by both Danny's reaction, this was the Clocky Ratchet heard about.

He finally had to let the twins go, as the two of them had stopped growing and asked for Clockwork more and more.

A few months later, a sheepish 14 year old Danny thanked Ratchet for his help after he was done with his shift at the medical wing.

Dani legitimately had to start over, but Danny just needed some specialized care.

Ratchet simply smirked and kept walking.

#transformers rescue bots #danny phantom #dpxtf #dpxtfrb

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gh0stlake · 1 month

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Hey guys hey guys hey guys

Look at this I drew my ocs(Kane[left) and Syll[bottom right])

There's fun facts about this drawing and omg I wanna talk about it, so!

•Kane is using one of those retro(damn really retro? That was my childhood I'm not even that old) Fisher-Price wheelie phones with eyes but if it were to function, it's just off screen.

° Kane is also wearing sylls shirt, it's of his fave band that Kane rarely even listens to. The design can be traced to a concept of syll's room I didn't post(lemme know if you want me to) however it's followed him for a while

• I had to completely redraw Syll before I colored cause the previous drawing made me cringe cause it didnt look right

° Kane was also a struggle to draw the reference I had just looked so wrong, I like it now tho :))

Damn id rant about their whole lore but this isn't the time hahaha, lemme know if you want me to tho

#artists on tumblr #oc art #digital art #oc #original character #my art #oc artwork #griffin division #original characters #oc stuff #my ocs #ocs #theyre pretty gay for each other if youre reading this #mlm #sis if you see a b!tch with a bad bob thats not me go the other way #meme audio inspo #character design #character art #my characters

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mariacallous · 3 months

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The Spectator asked me to write about George Galloway’s victory in Rochdale. I found it hard to feel anything but despair about working-class Muslim voters, who once again turned out in huge numbers for a white saviour and tankie[i] who had saluted Saddam Hussein, Bashir Assad and Vladimir Putin.

After all these years of exposure, no one has the right to feign ignorance about Galloway’s record. It’s not that his supporters do not know who Galloway is. It is that they know but do not care.

A large chunk of Muslim voters and an element on the white left adore him because he hates Israel and that is all that matters.

There’s a lot of drivel going around this morning that Galloway’s victory is a disaster for Labour. In the short-term that cannot be true.

Leave aside that Labour got into such a mess it did not even run a candidate, an analysis by Prof Rob Ford of Manchester University, and friend of this Substack, shows that Labour seats with a large Muslim vote are safe.

In the long run, though, it is a different story.

Lyndon Johnson is meant to have said that the skill you need most in politics is the ability to count. As the Muslim population grows and as Palestine becomes not one issue for the wider left but the issue, left politics will change

Here is how I see it

The Rochdale by-election raises a question that Labour will find hard to duck in government: can a European left-wing party survive without a pro-Islamist foreign policy? They can’t win with one, as Jeremy Corbyn proved twice. But the shocking success of George Galloway last night shows that the arguments of the Corbyn years have not been settled.

No one can pretend they do not know who the loudmouthed old ham really is after all this time. Just before Muslim voters propelled him to victory, Galloway received the endorsement of none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP).

To use an overused label correctly for once, the BNP is genuinely neo-fascist. And yet Griffin had no qualms in recommending that his followers ‘get out and vote for George Galloway’ and ‘stick two fingers up to the rotten political elite and their fake news media cronies’.

Like cocktails before a dinner party, obsessions about Jews bring all the extremists together.

What better illustration could you have of the horseshoe theory?

Admirers of dictators admire each other. Galloway ‘saluted’ Saddam Hussein, whose forces killed tens of thousands of Muslims. He praised Bashar al-Assad, as the Syrian president’s forces slaughtered the country’s Sunni Muslim population, for maintaining the ‘fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs’ – the grandiosity of Galloway’s pompous language was in inverse proportion to the misery Assad inflicted.

None of this concerned Muslim voters in Rochdale. Opposition to Israel was all that mattered.

There’s an argument doing the rounds this morning that Labour’s disastrous performance was just a blip. Galloway is a narcissist, it runs, who won’t last long. Muslim voters responded to his anti-Iraq war campaign and gave him victory in Bethnal Green in the 2005 general election. He was out by 2010. He won the Bradford by-election in 2012, and the voters rejected him in the 2015 general election. The voters of Rochdale will almost certainly do the same later this year.

Labour sounded confident. ‘George Galloway is only interested in stoking fear and division,’ the party told the BBC. Labour will ‘quickly’ select a new candidate for the upcoming general election, the spokesman said, adding the party wants to deliver the ‘representation and fresh start that Rochdale deserves’.

I am sure they will. Labour’s poll lead is so great, it can afford to be confident. But Rochdale raises a question about how Labour will deal with the obsessions of a large section of the left once in power, which are unlikely to go away.

The best way to think about it is to look at the threats to MPs and the endless denunciations of Keir Starmer. They are absurd on the face of it. Labour is in opposition. It has no influence over the Israeli government or Hamas whatsoever. What it says is supremely irrelevant.

But the explosion in rage makes sense if you see the anti-Starmer campaign as an attempt to bolster the chances of independent left-wing candidates and to change party policy. (For one, Jeremy Corbyn, kicked out of the party in October 2020 will be thinking of running in Islington North after Galloway’s victory.)

To date it has been a mess. Tom Baldwin, Keir Starmer’s biographer, says that the Labour leader and his team had simply not thought about Israel when they gave Benjamin Netanyahu a blank cheque after the Hamas atrocities in October. My guess is that they were so appalled by Labour’s anti-Semitism scandals of the 2010s they swung to the opposite extreme.

You can see how extreme they became by watching a YouTube clip from four months ago of Starmer telling Nick Ferrari that Israel had the right to ‘cut off power, cut off water’ to civilians in Gaza. It has been played tens of thousands of times by Starmer’s opponents.

Now he has spoken to the Israeli left, government figures in Qatar and Jordan, and the Biden administration and has embraced a standard centre-left suspicion of Netanyahu as a result.

I could go on about the Labour leadership’s naivety. How can you not have a settled view on the Israel/Palestine question when Israel so dominates leftist thinking? When, indeed, supporting Palestine is now for a large faction on the left almost the definition of what it means to be left-wing? It’s astonishing.

It is equally astonishing that due diligence did not spot that the official Labour candidate held views about Jews that weren’t just anti-Israel but were simply racist. Now Labour has moved on, and I can easily see a Labour government offering full diplomatic recognition to the Palestinian Authority as a compromise.

But that is no more than a Conservative government is likely to do. The activists are crying ‘from the river to the sea’ on the streets, and the Labour left do not want compromise. They want Labour to be like France’s largest left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI), which is for electoral, as well as ideological, reasons pro-Islamist.

LFI repeatedly declined to call Hamas a terrorist group (a conclusion the EU came to about Hamas a full 20 years ago). Their initial communique on 7 October used Hamas’s own language about itself, calling the attack ‘an armed offensive by Palestinian forces’ that came ‘in the context of the intensification by Israel of the policy of occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem’.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party can’t win a presidential election any more than Corbyn could win a general election.

And as with Corbynism, its foreign policy is not just about Palestine but includes a softness towards Vladimir Putin and the other dictators George Galloway salutes. On the other hand, LFI captures a large chunk of the Arab-French vote because it is pro-Islamist. And no French left-wing party can succeed without that vote.

Labour is so far ahead at present it can shrug off the mess in Rochdale, and predict with assurance that it will retake the seat at the election.

It can say it has learned from its mistake in underwriting Netanyahu and his extremely right-wing government and moved on.

In power, however, things will be different. What Labour says and does will finally matter, and elements in its electoral coalition will be making their demands very clear.

Labour hopes that Joe Biden’s ceasefire initiative will work, and that Israel will just go away as an issue.

That hope, as anyone who knows the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict since 1948 will guess, is likely to be vain.

This is the conflict that never goes away.

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yakool-foolio · 7 months

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The time has come for me to throw my two Rain Code OCs to the wolves! Let's break the ice for these two, shall we? Starting off with:

Name: Ringo Ignis Nickname: Jazz (callsign) Gender: Non-binary Pronouns: He/they Age: 24 Birthday: May 28th Height: 5’8” Eye Symbol: Vesica piscis Voice Claim: Griffin Burns Likes: Parkour, busywork, reptiles Dislikes: Lazing around, cold weather Instrument Motif: Marimba

A Master Detective with an expertise in visual trickery, specializing in stalking cases. Their Forte is Will-O-The-Wisp, a power honed to create a perfect holographic replica of themself that can be commanded through thought. However, the hologram cannot touch anything, and any directly applied pressure can destroy it. He’s surprisingly easy-going, preferring to roll with the punches and come up with plans on the fly rather than prepare in advance. His thrill-seeking lifestyle often places him on his lonesome, so they tend to find company in their own holograms. Anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity are likely to be roped into his spontaneous plans, as they’re always searching for a helping hand and potential friend. They’re also quite the workaholic, but the reason as to why is yet to be disclosed.

And next up, we have:

Name: Sylvester Nettle Nickname: Lieu (new name bestowed from Amaterasu) Gender: Non-binary Pronouns: They/them Age: 29 Birthday: September 13th Height: 5’11” Eye Symbol: General prohibition sign Voice Claim: Cherise Boothe Likes: Tea, sharpening tools Dislikes: Coffee, parties Instrument Motif: Cello

An Amaterasu hitman highly trained with poisons and close-quarters combat. Specially selected from a group of freelance hitmen alongside Hitman Zilch/Aide, they adapted quickly to Amaterasu’s hostile environment. They valued their camaraderie with Aide as much as the money they were paid for their services. Unfortunately, as Aide became more infatuated with Director Yomi, Lieu was forced to settle for a strained fellowship. They allowed themself to reminisce on the good old days to fuel their work ethic, in hopes they could rekindle the alliance they once had by jumping at any chance to show off. After Aide’s death, however, Lieu succumbs to their nurtured pride and is dead set on filling in the hole that his passing left in the peacekeeper division.

Feel free to ask any questions about either of them by the way! Fun facts, dynamics with canon characters, favorites; you name it, I've got it! I have a decent set-up for both of them, and I'd love to develop them as I go!

As a bonus, have two more Ringos!

#all designs were made from picrew #cause i do not have a bone in my body that has the drawing ability #fun fact ringo was in development hell for a while #but after i started developing lieu i came right back for them #no blorbo goes unaccounted for #rain code #rain code spoilers #rain code oc #ringo ignis #sylvester nettle

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hclib · 2 years

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Charge It

Lots of people are pulling out their credit cards today to snag Cyber Monday deals. In 1946, a new credit card debuted in Minneapolis, though it bears little resemblance to the ones we use today.

This new card, called a Charga-Plate, was designed to make it easier for local shoppers to use their store-specific charge accounts. Eight of the top Minneapolis retailers (The Baker Co., The Dayton Co., L.S. Donaldson Co., J.B. Hudson Co., Juster Brothers, Powers Dry Goods Co., Warner Hardware, and The Young-Quinlan Co.) collaborated to send Charga-Plates to their customers. A shopper would receive one Charga-Plate, no matter how many of the stores offered them credit. The location of notches on the plate indicated which stores held accounts for the shopper. The system was meant to speed up the check-out process by eliminating the need for clerks to look up who held credit at their store and then write their information on the receipt. Instead, the Charga-Plate was used to copy the buyer's name to the invoice quickly. Newspaper ads touted it as "A truly modern shopping service!"

This Charga-Plate from our collections belonged to Charlotte Griffin Weld. Weld was a leader in many civic organizations in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Friends of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the women's division of the Hennepin County War Finance Committee, and the Women's Association of the Minnesota Orchestra (WAMSO).

Photos of Charga-Plates from the Minneapolis Newspaper Photograph Collection in the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections. Weld's Charga-Plate from the Charlotte Griffin Weld Papers (M/A 0082).

#minneapolis #minnesota #shopping #credit cards #cyber monday #department stores #1940s

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naturalrights-retard · 6 months

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A new study by published in the journal Nature last week revealed that the mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) COVID-19 gene therapies can unexpectedly cause cells of the body to misread the mRNA coding and produce unintended proteins (also known as ribosomes), a process described in the study as “frameshifting.”1 2 3 4 5

The study by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Toxicology Unit at Cambridge University in England found that “bases with a chemical modification called N1-methylpseudouridine, which are currently contained in mRNA therapies,” are behind these misreads or “slips” along the mRNA sequence.3

One-Third of Vaccinated Individuals Experienced “Off-Target” Immune Responses

The study, which involved lab work on Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty shot in mice and subsequently on 21 people, found that about one-third of the vaccinated individuals experienced unintended immune responses. Researchers reportedly “identified the sequence within the mRNA that causes this to occur and found a way to prevent ‘off-target’ immune responses.”1 3

The study shows that the use of modified nucleotides (the building blocks of RNA) to produce the mRNA COVID shots can cause the “cellular machinery that reads the recipe for the mRNA to make proteins to slow down, pause, and then start reading again, but beginning from a slightly different point in the recipe,” according to Stephen Griffin, PhD, professor of cancer virology at Cambridge University. This means that, in addition to the “main vaccine-driven immune response against the spike protein, other minor responses can also arise targeting the new protein sequences.”4

“The messenger RNA vaccines contain short strands of genetic code that provide the instructions for the cells in our bodies to make copies of the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, said Neil Mabbott, PhD, who heads the immunology division of The Roslin Institute and Royal School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “These proteins are then used to train our immune systems to recognize and destroy the virus should we become infected with it.”4

Dr. Mabbott described the ability of mRNA shots to sometimes trigger a “process known as frameshift,” which can cause cells to misread the gene therapy’s mRNA, which can then create abnormal versions of the coronavirus spike protein being made.4

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bloodmaarked · 1 day

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babel, or the necessity of violence: an arcane history of the oxford translators' revolution // r.f. kuang

first published: 2022 re-read: 26 may 2024 – 10 june 2024 first read: 2023 pages: 542 format: hardback

genres: fiction; adult; fantasy (urban/magical realism); historical fiction favourite character(s): don't make me pick just one least favourite character(s): again, i can't choose (because they're all brilliant)

rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕 thoughts: haters will hate but they will never make me hate this book! i didn't realise i'd read babel the first time around so recently (about this time last year) - i guess i was that eager to read it again, and luckily it was just as good the second time around. most times on reread my opinion shifts slightly lower or higher, but i couldn't not give babel the full 5* once again.

r.f. kuang seems to be a bit of a divisive figure, and especially at one of my book clubs where babel and yellowface have their fair share of critics and fans. having been exposed to more of the criticism, i did go into this with a more open mind, but i have to say that i didn't see it... and maybe this book/kuang's writing is just something you either enjoy or don't. in terms of my own experience, i found babel to be a sharp and scathing critique of complacency and complicity within not just the British empire of the 1800s, but the power structures of today. it's told with the most wonderful cast of characters in a rich world that i felt immersed in from start to finish. i adored the realism of the fantasy and the way it was conducted via silver bars which were deeply integrated into the way the world worked.

i love, love, love the dark academia style of writing, both in the atmosphere of the world, and the academic style of writing. the writing was atmospheric and gorgeous, the tonal shifts between the beauty of oxford and the ugliness of the people who made it the institution it is captured perfectly. r.f. kuang loves her characters, and it really comes through in her writing. being with the cast, especially the core four, was like a warm hug. the title itself is just ridiculous in the best way, and i enjoyed the additional context contained in the footnotes, which were a really cool addition for a work of fiction. (i will say the asterisks were a little harder to find on the print edition i read this time around than they were on the e-book edition i read last year.)

i also have to give props to the research that had to have gone into the writing of this book, including the historical context and the etymological study. i was floored.

my wish is to have a griffin(/sterling) backstory, or a victoire sequel, but i doubt we'll ever get it :'(

the emotional beats didn't hit any less on reread, and that last chapter had my heart pumping hard. this is honestly a story that sits close to my heart and i see myself rereading this a thousand times. it may not be for everyone, but it's definitely for me and i couldn't be happier. you can read my original review for babel here.

#babel an arcane history #babel or the necessity of violence #r.f. kuang #2024 reads #5 stars #fiction #fantasy #book review #booklr #bookblr #bookworm

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