The audiences for Tuah and Tucker are probably similar in intelligence but one is less harmful because they know their limitations. pic.twitter.com/NNC7qdkhbd

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) September 28, 2024

Newsweek

The dog's owner told Newsweek: "Each morning when I feed the kittens, [Dakota] pushes her way in. I usually bottle feed them and she's always right there, even at 4 a.m., as they need to be fed every three to four hours at a time."

The video shows Dakota waiting patiently outside a door before it's opened, after which she heads towards the bathroom where a carrier containing kittens is seen inside an empty bathtub. The tiny feline friends are later shown scattered around the bathtub, with Dakota sticking her head in among them.

"Dakota is the best foster assistant when we have baby kitties. She loves to help me feed them & babysits them too! #fosterkittens #saintbernard #animallover #fosteringsaveslives #fostermom"

I can't believe I'm writing this at age 65

i have just unearthed 20 plus years of my husbands "other life"as he calls it.

there have been many indicators over the years which I have chosen to ignore for fear of the truth. It was when the viagra tablets fell out of his pocket I knew he was up to something. A couple of weeks later he inadvertently left his WhatsApp thread up

on the home computer so all was

revealed. It seems he has been engaging in regular s*x sessions in hotels and at "flats" with numerous young girls for years. The amount of money that has gone out is also harrowing. I am so shocked and distressed I don't know what to do. If I tell the family it will break them. My kids have already survived my first marriage where I was subject to hideous domestic ,emotional and financial abuse. They all love my present husband dearly! I've confronted him and he has admitted all and says he will change and we can work it out

I have missed out a lot of detail because the above is enough. I don't know what to do.

im too old for this. I think I should leave but my kids will be devastated and I almost think I should just keep quiet for their sake and just live my own life from the same home.

Ive never posted like this before but I can't tell anyone atm if fear of others finding out

it helps a lot to write it all down

omg how could someone do something like that to their partner?

Fortunately I haven't slept with him for years since my suspected were raised

( obviously my fault that he has to go elsewhere!)

Ive kept this in my head for way too long

Oh right, that's why.

>since my suspected were raised

yes, I'm sure that's the reason

Sorry but it's not s*x parties is it? He's paying for s*x isn't he? How likely is it these girls have been trafficked and aren't willing participants?

As above , a s*x party surely willing participants swapping partners

He is paying for s*x with potentially unwilling women

can't have a foid thread without at least a bit of random speculative catastrophising

And no. It's not your fault he's had to go elsewhere. It's his. Lots of people sleep apart as they get older and it works fine for them. Lots of them also don't take viagra and have s*x with strangers

>just have a completely sexless, affectionless relationship, it's completely normal

Do what makes you happiest.

You are not obliged to have s*x when you do not wish to so it is not your fault. Sexual incompatibility is common .... most men do not resolve this with the use of prostitutes.

Men should just suffer without s*x and...and that's it

Bloody heck! 78!

So sorry you have had this happen.

Reminds me of the ''Cynthia Payne'' luncheon vouchers parties that there was a film about, and a book -

'Madame Cyn'' said she only had older men at her 's*x parties'- there was a ''Wing Commander'' and others in pics in her book- it was eye opening.

You'd think at 78 he'd have lost interest.

Men!

arrgghh why can't men turn completely asexual faster

Brutal honesty?

He won't change

But if you've not had s*x for years and aren't bothered, stay, lead separate lives, do what you want when you want and hopefully he will die first and leave you all his remaining £.

How about use some of that feminine empathy to try to find out why he feels the way he does and then solve the problem together?

lol just kidding, coldly wait for him to die and then take all his money

I think the key here is that in all probability these girls are not willing participants in the activity, and likely victims of trafficking and forced into prostitution - and he will know that. And that is complicity in a crime, immoral, eeew.

>oh god please let it be r*pe so I can feel even more self righteous

My 90 year old uncle still has threesomes. My aunt passed away several years ago. He wasn't faithful throughout the marriage but things sort of exploded when he turned around your husband's age @KeenLeader .

based wrinkly s*x addict

!foidmoment !moidmoment

Democrats are making cartoons about Dictator Trump

You have to watch omg 😂 pic.twitter.com/yqKY2nbr9F

— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) September 25, 2024

From the people who made the ad:

BARDO, the team that brought this project to life, began with a poll commissioned by Elizabeth Cabraser and Eva Paterson. It revealed that uncommitted voters could be swayed if made aware of Trump's alarming statements, such as his willingness to terminate the Constitution or act as a dictator. 50% of voters in America are swing voters.

Our poll showed that this information could shift 7% of these swing voters toward the Democratic ticket. In response, Paterson began creating a dystopian video to highlight the dangers of a Trump re-election, incorporating animation and a strong creative team. With $150,000 raised, the Bardo team believes this effort could be crucial in deciding between Vice President Harris or President Trump.

https://bardo2024.com/

"Hur dur twitter leftie dude noticed me now I must fill the site with r*pe jokes."

This is stupid even for this site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_by_Piece_(2024_film)

?????????????????????????????????????????????

!kino ??????

After 40 years of rampant corporate crime, there's a new sheriff in town: Jonathan Kanter was appointed by Biden to run the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and he's overseen 170 "significant antitrust actions" in the past 2.5 years, culminating in a court case where Google was ruled to be an illegal monopolist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Kanter's work is both extraordinary and par for the course. As Kanter said in a recent keynote for the Fordham Law Competition Law Institute's 51st Annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy, we're witnessing an epochal, global resurgence of antitrust:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general-jonathan-kanter-delivers-remarks-fordham-competition-law-0

Kanter's incredible enforcement track record isn't just part of a national trend - his colleagues in the FTC, CFPB and other agencies have also been pursuing an antitrust agenda not seen in generations - but also a worldwide trend. Antitrust enforcers in Canada, the UK, the EU, South Korea, Australia, Japan and even China are all taking aim at smashing corporate monopolies. Not only are they racking up impressive victories against these giant corporations, they're stealing the companies' swagger. After all, the point of enforcement isn't just to punish wrongdoing, but also to deter wrongdoing by others.

Until recently, companies hurled themselves into illegal schemes (mergers, predatory pricing, tying, refusals to deal, etc) without fear or hesitation. Now, many of these habitual offenders are breaking the habit, giving up before they've even tried. Take Wiz, a startup that turned down Google's record-shattering $23b buyout offer, understanding that the attempt would draw more antitrust scrutiny than it was worth:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wiz-turns-down-23-billion-022926296.html

As welcome as this antitrust renaissance is, it prompts an important question: why didn't we enforce antitrust law for the 40 years between Reagan and Biden?

That's what Kanter addresses the majority of his remarks to. The short answer is: crooked academic economists took bribes from monopolists and would-be monopolists to falsify their research on the impacts of monopolists, and made millions (literally - one guy made over $100m at this) testifying that monopolies were good and efficient.

After all, governments aren't just there to enforce rules - they have to make the rules first, and do to that, they need to understand how the world works, so they can understand how to fix the places where it's broken. That's where experts come in, filling regulators' dockets and juries' ears with truthful, factual testimony about their research. Experts can still be wrong, of course, but when the system works well, they're only wrong by accident.

The system doesn't work well. Back in the 1950s, the tobacco industry was threatened by the growing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. Industry scientists confirmed this finding. In response, the industry paid statisticians, doctors and scientists to produce deceptive research reports and testimony about the tobacco/cancer link.

The point of this work wasn't to make necessarily to convince people that tobacco was safe - rather, it was to create the sense that the safety of tobacco was a fundamentally unanswerable question. "Experts disagree," and you're not qualified to figure out who's right and who's wrong, so just stop trying to figure it out and light up.

In other words, Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook wasn't so much an attack on "the truth" as it was an attack on epistemology - the system by which we figure out what is true and what isn't. The tactic was devastatingly effective. Not only did it allow the tobacco giants to kill millions of people with impunity, it allowed them to reap billions of dollars by doing so.

Since then, epistemology has been under sustained assault. By the 1970s, Big Oil knew that its products would render the Earth unfit for human habitation, and they hired the same companies that had abetted Big Tobacco's mass murder to provide cover for their own slow-motion, planetary scale killing spree.

Time and again, big business has used assaults on epistemology to provide cover for unthinkable crimes. This has given rise to today's epistemological crisis, in which we don't merely disagree about what is true, but (far more importantly) disagree about how the truth can be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/#when-you-know-you-know

Ask a conspiratorialist why they believe in Qanon or Hatians in Springfield eating pets, and you'll get an extremely vibes-based answer - fundamentally, they believe it because it feels true. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason their way into.

This assault on reason itself is at the core of Kanter's critique. He starts off by listing three cases in which academic economists allowed themselves to be corrupted by the monopolies they studied:

i. George Mason University tricked an international antitrust enforcer into attending a training seminar that they believed to be affiliated with the US government. It was actually sponsored by the very companies that enforcer was scrutnizing, and featured a parade of "experts" who asserted that these companies were great, actually.

ii. An academic from GMU - which receives substantial tech industry funding - signed an amicus brief opposing an enforcement action against their funders. The academic also presented a defense of these funders to the OECD, all while posing as a neutral academic and not disclosing their funding sources.

iii. An ex-GMU economist, Kanter, submitted a study defending Qualcomm against the FTC, without disclosing that he'd been paid to do so. Wright has elevated undisclosed conflicts of interest to an art form:

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/google-lawyer-secret-weapon-joshua-wright-c98d5a31

Kanter is at pains to point out that these three examples aren't exception. The economics profession - whose core tenet is "incentive matter" - has made it standard practice for individual researchers and their academic institutions to take massive sums from giant corporations. Incredibly, they insist that this has nothing to do with their support of monopolies as "efficient."

Academic centers often serve as money-laundries for monopolist funders; researchers can evade disclosure requirements when they publish in journals or testify in court, saying only that they work for some esteemed university, without noting that the university is utterly dependent on money from the companies they're defending.

Now, Kanter is a lawyer, not an academic, and that means that his job is to advocate for positions, and he's at pains to say that he's got nothing but respect for ideological advocacy. What he's objecting to is partisan advocacy dressed up as impartial expertise.

For Kanter, mixing advocacy with expertise doesn't create expert advocacy - it obliterates expertise, as least when it comes to making good policy. This mixing has created a "crisis of expertise...a pervasive breakdown in the distinction between expertise and advocacy in competition policy."

The point of an independent academia, enshrined in the American Association of University Professors' charter, is to "advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators." We need an independent academy, because "to be of use to the legislator or the administrator, [an academic] must enjoy their complete confidence in the disinterestedness of [his or her] conclusions."

It's hard to overstate just how much money economists can make by defending monopolies. Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner gives the rate at $1,000/hour. Monopoly's top defenders make unimaginable sums, like U Chicago's Dennis Carlton, who's brought in over $100m in consulting fees.:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-09-24-economists-as-apologists/

The hidden cost of all of this is epistemological consensus. As Tim Harford writes in his 2021 book The Data Detective, the truth can be known through research and peer-review:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

But when experts deliberately seek to undermine the idea of expertise, they cast laypeople into an epistemological void. We know these questions are important, but we can't trust our corrupted expert institutions. That leaves us with urgent questions - and no answers. That's a terrifying state to be in, and it makes you easy pickings for authoritarian grifters and conspiratorial swindlers.

Seen in this light, Kanter's antitrust work is even more important. In attacking corporate power itself, he is going after the machine that funds this nihilism-inducing corruption machine.

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

Rate my Tina, 30gs that I've taken from a dead RSF soilder iam sure he doesn't need it where he's going . usually it goes for the eqialvent of 45$ here in Khartoum, sudan. We're in the middle of a civil war btw, i fight with the Sudanese army and the rapid support forces are the ops basically! Added last two pics as proof iam not full of shit, lol

!g*mers !chads

From a horror Deviant art account

"After an evening of shitposting on Reddit, you close your laptop and decide to go for a drink at your local bar.

As you make your way there, you see a shape quickly move past you.

"You just downmarseyd your last Reddit post, you heckin' bully!" you hear behind you.

Surprised by the sudden ambush, the last thing you see is the limited edition Rick & Morty Funko-Pop that gets violently embedded into your eye socket."

https://www.deviantart.com/jimmynijs/art/Soyjak-928590900

What did he mean by this???

Holy shit this case filing from @swan is like a movie scripthttps://t.co/lBZK6sZiMu

— Harsha Goli (@_arshbot) September 26, 2024

!kino !eurochads

I watched Mars Express the other day, a French animated Sci-fi film from last year and it was fantastic. Lots of cool ideas, great style and an interesting story, absolutely gets my recommendation.

I also watched the short series Crisis Jung by the same director, it was kind of like a gay French fist of the North Star, not as good as Mars Express but still a fun watch with lots of gore, dark humour and animated close-ups of arseholes

I've never watched any European animations before other than some tv shows when I was kid, and The Peasants if that counts, (also really good) anyone have any good recommendations?

Fantastic Planet and The Triplets of Belleville are the obvious one and they're definitely next on my list but don't really have any idea other than that

No, I'm not telling you a precise location. Maybe vague hints, but

https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/you-can-only-imagine-the-shock-and-disgust-grieving-mother-was-given-birthing-blanket-with-stillborn-childs-remains-instead-of-cremated-ashes-lawsuit-says/

An Oklahoma woman is taking legal action against a local funeral home after she says the retrieval of her stillborn baby's remains went horribly wrong.

Aurora Hartley said she was excited to become a mother, but that she was devastated when she went into preterm labor at 27 weeks in November of 2023. Hartley delivered a stillborn child, Hadley, and after the birth, turned Hadley's body over to the Medical Examiner's office in Oklahoma City so that an autopsy could be performed.

According to Hartley's lawyers, Hadley's body was then sent by the Medical Examiner's office to Alpha and Omega Mortuary to be cremated. Hartley then picked up what she thought were Hadley's cremated remains and hospital birthing blanket at Brown's Funeral Service in Coalgate, Oklahoma.

According to John Zelbst, Hartley's attorney, his client opened the birthing blanket and found the remains of the child, Oklahoma City CBS affiliate KWTV reported.

"You can only imagine the shock and disgust," the lawyer told local news.

Zelbst said the family returned to Brown's Funeral Service for more information only to find that they received an urn with an unknown person's ashes — not the remains of their child.

"We have an urn with ashes that no one knows who they belong to," Zelbst said. "It's not our clients' baby. So what family is missing their loved one?"

Zelbst said that the funeral home told Coalgate police that the ashes were not Hadley's remains, but that they were ashes of a cremated placenta.

"They give this excuse that it's the placenta, which is not a placenta. It has no characteristics of a cremation," said Zelbst, according to KWTV. "So that starts the cover-up."

Dan Markoff, another attorney representing Hartley, said he is waiting for the state board to step in and shut down one or both of the funeral service providers.

In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) investigated the operator of Alpha & Omega Mortuary Service and Crematory for violations of federal employment laws. The mortuary is operated by Stillwell Limited, Inc. The DOL said in a statement that Stillwell deprived its employees of overtime rate for time over 40 hours worked in a single week. The company also failed to keep proper records, as is required under federal law.

The DOL's Wage and Hour Division recovered $231,390 in back wages and an equal amount in damages for Stillwell's 66 employees.

"By denying their employees all of their hard-earned wages, Alpha and Omega Mortuary Service and Crematory violated the law and harmed the people on whom the company depends to work long hours to provide an important service to the community in return for low wages," said Wage and Hour Division District Director Michael Speer in Oklahoma City in a statement in April. "We are committed to protecting workers and providing clear and confidential compliance assistance to any employee or employer with questions."

Brown's Funeral Service did not respond to request for comment. Stillwell Limited, Inc. could not be reached for comment.

I really would like to know how this could even happen. Whose ashes have they had?

Too based of a website to exist