Avatar

to hell with good intentions

@verifiedaccount / verifiedaccount.tumblr.com

velvetlobsterpool, he/him
Posts
Avatar
reblogged
iaiamothrafhtagn
Avatar
afloweroutofstone

In my new report, I provide the first ever look inside of a US military program known as the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, which gives major government contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing a way to influence senior military policymakers.

Image
Subsidizing the Military-Industrial Complex: A Review of the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) Program
For nearly 30 years, an obscure Department of Defense (DoD) program has given Pentagon contractors a taxpayer-subsidized opportunity to infl
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

The program sends US military officers to work at major corporations for nearly a year; when they return, the fellows submit recommendations for reform of the Pentagon based on their observations of the private sector. 

We document numerous examples of companies using this program to pass along self-interested policy recommendations to US military leaders, including: more outsourcing, corporate subsidies, deregulation, less oversight, more political power to contractors, looser arms export rules, and more. We also analyzed a sample of former SDEF fellows and found that 43% of them go through the revolving door and work for military contractors after leaving the program. As such, the SDEF program uses government money to help subsidize the military-industrial complex, placing corporate interests above the public interest.

You can read my summary of the report here, along with coverage by The Lever here.

Avatar
reblogged
windsymphony
Avatar
wastedawayagaininmargaritaville

I’ve been talking with a Gazan teenager trying to evacuate on Instagram for a little while. He has a fundraiser going if anyone has $ they can share. Or just share the link ❤️ Thank you ❤️

Image
My ambition is to continue my educational career, organized by amjd Shms
Hello, I am Amjad, I am nineteen years old, a university student. You destr… amjd Shms needs your support for My ambition is to continue my
gofundme.com
Avatar
wastedawayagaininmargaritaville

1789/5000 raised, please share and donate if you able!

Avatar

You know, I haven’t actually heard Taylor Swift’s music that often. I basically just hear it at convenience stores, supermarkets, other places that have a radio station running. I’m bombarded much more by things about Taylor Swift, whether it’s ads or people talking. The actual music is easy not to run into, although that may have more to do with me being a guy in my early thirties that rarely goes anywhere.

You know, I’m looking at a recent conversation with a friend and the celebrities we were talking about were Joe Don Baker and John Carradine (specifically sad, alcoholic, late-period John Carradine when he was appearing in Al Adamson and Greydon Clark movies), so this post is probably more of a reflection of how out of touch I am, but it can be pleasant to be out of touch if you’ve got other people to be out of touch with.

Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
iaiamothrafhtagn

so. this is a hard post for me to write, given that this is, i think, the fifth time i've started trying to write it and first time i haven't chickened out halfway through this first sentence where i admit that part.

i'll save you all the time and energy and get what this post is about out of the way, first: i need money, badly. yeah, this is another post where a disabled, brain-damaged trans woman tells you her sob story and asks you for cash to mitigate it. shocking, i know. it's almost like it's hard for women like us to survive under capitalism, or something!

but here's facts: i'm currently jobless. now, normally this would not be the end of my fucking world - i have a patreon that's meant to help cover my basic living expenses and provide something of a cushion, and at least momentarily i have a roommate who's being very understanding about my difficulties covering any portion of the rent. however. that roommate is already looking for new places to live. and i am not the only one in financial dire straits at the moment, and in fact it seems like virtually everyone in my social circle that i normally know i can rely on to help keep those of us less-employable queers afloat is under severe financial duress to the degree they've had to pull out of doing any of that for the foreseeable, and as a result - my current expected net income per month for the foreseeable future, as far as i can plan on it being, is limited to what i make on patreon: exactly $171. and right when i have medical debts incurred from veterinary intervention to save my cat's life that i need to pay off monthly or start incurring severe interest on, too! ain't life grand? i don't know when, or even if, i'll be able to change this state of affairs; in an ideal world, i'd be able to claim self-employment and have it be true. we do not live in an ideal world, so my best shot at that is asking for you to support my patreon or buy my work off itch.

in fact, i am asking, just short of begging, for you to do one or both of these things before any other option. it's not that i don't need immediate financial aid, because i do. but more than that: i need to fucking survive, bitch. i need to reliably have enough money to keep a roof over my head and food in my mouth and if i can accomplish both of those things i can also do the other, fun things that people like to get from me, like long, thoughtful critiques of this piece of art or that piece of media or any number of other things that i am compelled by my demons to produce awhile. you may notice some of that's dried up recently, and part of that's panic-induced brain spiral shutdown in effect. it is, in fact, easier to make art, criticism included, when you're not worrying whether buying a soda now means risking overdrafting on your cell phone bill later.

it's here where i wish i had hustle. i'd love to be one of those pledge allegiance to the grind types that you know only gets better the hungrier i am, give you something to look forward to as an earn on your investment in me and my future; unfortunately, i'm just not one of those people. hunger just makes me hungry, it doesn't make me more capable.

i won't make any promises i can't keep. but if you give me money, especially if you give me money i can consistently count on being there when i need it and enough of it i don't need to worry about what i'm gonna eat or where i'm gonna stay, there will be work made off the back of that financial security. and if you like any of the work i've done to date, both as a media critic and as a fiction writer, i can promise you it'll meet your expectations.

thanks for your time.

and here, for ease of access, some links:

my patreon my itch.io account paypal ko-fi venmo (i do not currently have a working cashapp account. sorry.)

Avatar

I'm trying to read the Paste review of the new Swift album. It being the only red review on metacritic worked, they got my click. Amusingly, the byline is "Paste Staff," no one's jumping in front of that bullet. I'm pretty sure it's terribly written, but they whoever wrote it seems to have enough of a sense of words and phrases people do use that I do doubt myself a bit.

"There’s a reason why keyboards defined the 1980s; they rebelled against the very oppressive nature existing outside of the cultural company they kept. There’s resistance in electronic music that, while they brandish an aesthetic that, to a layman’s ears, seems like technicolor hues for any infectious pop track, it’s a genre that aches to tell its own story."

I mean, these are two of the worst examples, that second sentence trips over its clauses. Inserting an "in" as in "There's a resistance in electronic music in that, while they..." makes it possible to parse, but then you hit the fuck up after that comma where there's a shift from reference to "electronic music" to "they." This should read, "There's a resistance in electronic music in that, while brandishing an aesthetic that, to layman's ears, sounds [wait, they said 'seems' in their review? well, it should be 'sounds'] like technicolor hues for any"

We hit some more really bad phrasing there, "brandish an aesthetic that," "technicolor hues for any infectious pop track"

I was trying to just get to what a readable, properly copy edited version of what the writer was trying to express was, in order to critique their expression accurately, but the only way to arrive at anything you can make something of is throwing out sentences like those and starting again. There's 3000 fucking words of this.

"What separates The Tortured Poets Department from something like Reputation is that, on the latter, Swift made it known what was at stake and who she was making that album for—herself, in the aftermath of her greatest long-standing criticisms (“Look What You Made Me Do” triumphs exactly because of this)."

I can at least get what the writer is gesturing at meaning but "herself, in the aftermath of her greatest long-standing criticisms" is excruciating prose.

This is your big shot! You have the first red on metacritic harsh pan of the new Taylor Swift album! Eyes are on you, how are you blowing it this bad? I've seen those lyrics! How are you doing such a bad job landing hits? How much did somebody get paid to write this and was anybody paid to edit it?

Avatar
reblogged
papasmoke
Avatar
cruciform-solidarity
Avatar
verifiedaccount
Image
Israel: The Way Out | David Shulman
If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality and face some
The New York Review of Books
Most eyes are focused now on Gaza, for good reason. The catastrophe is there for all to see. But I want to begin with the Palestinian village of Mu‘arrajat, in the Jordan Valley on the occupied West Bank. In mid-March I stayed overnight there with other activists, in what we call “protective presence”—a concerted effort to protect Palestinian villagers from the rampages of armed Israeli settlers who are terrorizing them day and night. Mu‘arrajat now has two settler outposts at its throat, one deep in the grazing grounds of the Palestinian shepherds (forbidden territory for them since the war in Gaza began) and another on the hill above the village. In October settlers from these outposts were stopping Palestinians’ cars on the highway and telling their occupants that they had twenty-four hours to leave their homes and that they would be killed if they refused. A few weeks ago these settlers came into the village and dug a row of empty graves near the school—a sign of what they want to do to the people of Mu‘arrajat. Violent intrusions by masked, heavily armed settlers, often together with soldiers, are by now routine. The honorific term “soldiers” in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills really refers to paramilitary units, in uniform, made up of settlers who have been armed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the convicted criminal and Jewish supremacist whom Benjamin Netanyahu appointed minister of national security in November 2022. They are a law unto themselves. The settlers’ mantra—“Get out or we will kill you”—has been repeated in nearly all the villages in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills. Most of our friends in the villages have heard it. Usually it is uttered in the course of attacks on Palestinian homes, sheep pens, food supplies, water tanks and wells, wind turbines, and anything else the invaders can wreck. Sometimes these settlers shoot at the villagers and kill sheep and goats. We know of at least sixteen Palestinian villages that have been evacuated over the last few months because of ceaseless settler violence backed by the army; many more are barely hanging on. International pressure has had some meaningful impact on the situation, but for the most part the settlers are winning this miniwar. They tend to be fanatical men or adolescent boys, brainwashed, apocalyptic, and messianic, who have emerged from the dark and brutal undercurrents of religious Zionism. They want to rid the West Bank of all non-Jews (and maybe some secular Jews as well) in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah, who is scheduled to turn up as soon as this campaign of ethnic cleansing is completed. But the ideological motivation is only part of the story; we who have seen these people in action, who have met them in the field, can confirm that many of them are driven by sheer sadistic pleasure.
You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.