California can stop Larry Ellison from buyingĀ Warners
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For months, the hottest will-they/won't-they drama in Hollywood concerned the suitors for Warners, up for sale again after being bought, merged, looted and wrecked by the eminently guillotineable David Zaslav:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izC9o3LhnVk
From the start, it was clear that Warners would be sucked dry and discarded, but the Trump 2024 election turned the looting of Warners' corpse into a high-stakes political drama.
On the one hand, you had Netflix, who wanted to buy Warners and use them to make good movies, but also to kill off movie theaters forever by blocking theatrical distribution of Warners' products.
On the other hand, you had Paramount, owned by the spray-tan cured tech billionaire jerky Larry Ellison, though everyone is supposed to pretend that Ellison's do-nothing/know-nothing/amounts-to-nothing son Billy (or whatever who cares) Ellison is running the show.
Ellison's plan was to buy Warners and fold it into the oligarchic media capture project that's seen Ellison replace the head of CBS with the tedious mediocrity Bari Weiss:
This is a multi-pronged media takeover that includes Jeff Bezos neutering the Washington Post, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a Nazi bar, and Trump stealing Tiktok and giving it to Larry Ellison. If Ellison gains control over Warners, you can add CNN to the nonsense factory.
But for a while there, it looked like the Ellisons would lose the bidding. Little Timmy (or whatever who cares) Ellison only has whatever money his dad parks in his bank account for tax purposes, and Larry Ellison is so mired in debt that one margin call could cost him his company, his fighter jet, and his Hawaiian version of Little St James Island.
Warners' board may not give a shit about making good media or telling the truth or staving off fascism, but they do want to get paid, and Netflix has money in the bank, whereas Ellison only has the bank's money (for now).
But last week, the dam broke: Warners' board indicated they'd take Paramount's offer, and Netflix withdrew their offer, and so that's that, right? It's not like Trump's FTC is going to actually block this radioactively illegal merger, despite the catastrophic corporate consolidation that would result, with terrible consequences for workers, audiences, theaters, cable operators and the entire supply chain.
Not so fast! The Clayton Act ā which bars this kind of merger ā is designed to be enforced by the feds, state governments, and private parties. That means that California AG Rob Bonta can step in to block this merger, which he's getting ready to do:
As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, state AGs block mergers all the time, even when the feds decline to step in ā just a couple years ago, Washington state killed the Kroger/Albertsons merger.
The fact that antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level is a genius piece of policy design. As the old joke goes, "AG" stands for "aspiring governor," and the fact that state AGs can step in to rescue their voters from do-nothing political hacks in Washington is catnip for our nation's attorneys general.
Bonta is definitely feeling his oats: he's also going after Amazon for price-fixing, picking up a cause that Trump dropped after Jeff Bezos ordered the Washington Post to cancel its endorsement of Kamala Harris, paid a million bucks to sit on the inaugural dais, millions more to fund the White House Epstein Memorial Ballroom and $40m more to make an unwatchable turkey of a movie about Melania Trump.
Can you imagine how stupid Bezos is going to feel when all of his bribes to Trump cash out to nothing after Rob Bonta publishes Amazon's damning internal memos and then fines the company a gazillion dollars?
It's a testament to the power of designing laws so they can be enforced by multiple parties. And as cool as it is to have a law that state AGs can enforce, it's way cooler to have a law that can be enforced by members of the public.
This is called a "private right of action" ā the thing that lets impact litigation shops like Planned Parenthood, EFF, and the ACLU sue over violations of the public's rights. The business lobby hates the private right of action, because they think (correctly) that they can buy off enough regulators and enforcers to let them get away with murder (often literally), but they know they can't buy off every impact litigation shop and every member of the no-win/no-fee bar.
For decades, corporate America has tried to abolish the public's right to sue companies under any circumstances. That's why so many terms of service now feature "binding arbitration waivers" that deny you access to the courts, no matter how badly you are injured:
But long before Antonin Scalia made it legal to cram binding arbitration down your throat, corporate America was pumping out propaganda for "tort reform," spreading the story that greedy lawyers were ginning up baseless legal threats to extort settlements from hardworking entrepreneurs. These stories are 99.9% bullshit, including urban legends like the "McDonald's hot coffee" lawsuit:
Ever since Reagan, corporate America has been on a 45-year winning streak. Nothing epitomizes the arrogance of these monsters more than the GW Bush administration's sneering references to "the reality-based community":
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality ā judiciously, as you will ā we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actorsā¦and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Giving Ellison, Bezos and Musk control over our media seems like the triumph of billionaires' efforts to "create their own reality," and indeed, for years, they've been able to gin up national panics over nothingburgers like "trans ideology," "woke" and "the immigration crisis."
But just lately, that reality-creation machine has started to break down. Despite taking over the press, locking every reality-based reporter out of the White House, and getting Musk, Zuck and Ellison to paint their algorithms spray-tan orange, people just fucking hate Trump. He is underwater on every single issue:
Despite the full-court press ā from both the Dem and the GOP establishment ā to deny the genocide in Gaza and paint anyone (especially Jews like me) who condemn the slaughter as "antisemites," Americans condemn Israel and are fully in the tank for Palestinians:
Despite throwing massive subsidies at coal and tying every available millstone around renewables' ankles before throwing all the solar panels and windmills into the sea, renewables are growing and ā to Trump's great chagrin ā oil companies can't find anyone to loan them the money they need to steal Venezuela's oil:
Reality turns out to be surprisingly stubborn, and what's more, it has a pronounced left-wing bias. Putting little Huey (or whatever who cares) Ellison in charge of Warners will be bad news for the news, for media, for movies and TV, and for my neighbors in Burbank. But when it comes to shaping the media, Freddy (or whatever who cares) Ellison will continue to eat shit.
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the cognitive dissonance from people who want the products of modern medicine but get weird about animal research. like im sorry but this is necessary for the survival of the society we currently live in. and the scientists who work on these things are not evil cackling psychopaths. anyone you talk to in animal research has incredibly complex feelings about their work and incredibly complex relationships to the animals in their care. there are regulations and oversight and penalties in place to make the work as humane as possible and scientists are overwhelmingly the ones enforcing and advocating for better care.
@velvetdemon I'm doing a full reply because I want to give this question the time and space it deserves, and I really do appreciate your curiosity about this.
The short answer: It is deeply unethical. There are nowhere near enough willing patients in the world to be able to do this, and it would be criminal to put them through this.
The long answer: The one side of the equation you're focusing on is: how much of a drug is too much, to the point where it will cause negative side effects or even death? And this is crucial to know. But it's not just a matter of finding out the lethal dosage of a heart cholesterol medication, you need to know that it can actually lower the cholesterol of any living thing. There is no way to know this without giving it first to...a living thing.
But beyond this, I need to emphasize: The goal of a drug trial is to effectively cure people who are already suffering from disease, who are living on limited time.
Drug trials don't just happen on any member of the public, they need to happen specifically on people affected by the disease you're trying to treat. There is at any time a very limited and very marginalized population of the world affected by early onset, familial Parkinson's disease. Because you cannot ethically induce disease in a human being, you are working with, speaking with, and helping patients and their families who are hopeful and desperate for a cure.
If you were to jump straight to human trials from petri dishes, not knowing absolutely anything about how the drug functions in a living, breathing animal body, it would look like this:
We didn't know that minute quantities of the drug interact lethally with x, y, z medication that people are commonly also taking. X number of patients have died as a result.
We didn't know that the drug is fatal to people with [common variant] in their genetics. X more patients have died.
We didn't know the drug exacerbates x, y, z chronic illnesses. X number of people have acquired permanent, lifelong disabilities.
We didn't know the best way to deliver the drug, so we tried multiple ways: the people who received it intravenously are now suffering from a painful, costly, and debilitating condition that did not happen with the ingested form.
I could go on, and on, and on.
The vast majority of these problems can be nearly or almost entirely averted by testing other animals first.
These are all people who possibly could have waited for the normal progression from animal testing to human testing and thus received better outcomes. Some people will pass away in the time it takes to get to that point, and that's heartbreaking, and we all wish science could be faster.
But the cost of expediting science could mean a life of profoundly greater suffering or an even shorter life than the one where no intervention happens at all. And at that point, you have completely exhausted your trust, your goodwill, and your patients' hope, after you've failed to do anything or even worsened the lives of people who are already deeply suffering.
hi, iām an animal research professional. making sure laboratory animals stay alive, healthy, and enriched has been my full-time job for several years now.
animal research is not the mad scientist wild west that PETA wants you to think it is. there are extremely strict federal laws in place to protect the well being of these animals. animal welfare organizations like AAALAC ensure that lab animals are treated with dignity & respect and are given enough specialized care & enrichment to be happy and content in captivity, just like AZA accreditation with zoos.
not a single animal from a zebrafish to a mouse to a dog to a macaque goes unaccounted for. if an animal gets moved to a new cage, paired for breeding, has a procedure performed on it, gives birth, gets sick or injured, dies, etc. it isĀ legally requiredĀ that this information is recorded and kept on file for the US federal government to access. failing to record & retain this information is very much punishable by US federal law.
let me tell you - if you abuse or kill an animal, even a mouse - you are almost certainly getting both fired & blacklisted from the industry. if you abuse or kill a more āadvancedā animal, such as a dog or monkey, you will likely face criminal charges. killing a monkey is as serious and disastrous as a nuclear meltdown. you are expected to reasonably explain every illness, injury, or death of an animal under your care. you must record all of this information. animals that are clearly suffering with low QOL are required to be euthanized according to AVMA guidelines.
research animals are highly expensive. yes, even the "lesser" animals like mice. the cheapest mice will run you a few hundred $ per individual, with some of the most expensive mice i've cared for being $25,000 per individual. in research we have the "three Rs" - reduction (reduce amount of necessary animals to a minimum), refinement (refine processes to ensure research is accurate and animals feel no pain or distress), and replacement (replace animals with non-living research models as they become available). i can assure you no proper research team is wasting animals (*do not* say "b-b-but elon musk--" his research team is actively being investigated for animal abuse by the government).
research methods that do not require live animals are currently being looked into & efforts spearheaded by - you guessed it - the animal research industry itself (notice how the animal rights people are strangely silent & unhelpful when it comes to this?) but current technology is rudimentary and does not compare to live animal models.
some research animal fun facts (US edition):
all species of animals are only allowed to have one single major surgery performed on them in their entire lifetime.
institutions with nonhuman primates must have a behavior program in place (run by knowledgeable primate specialists) to ensure that they are happy and receiving enough daily enrichment and social interaction.
institutions with dogs are required to have physical exercise programs in place. this means every individual dog gets a substantial amount of leashed AND free-roaming exercise daily, including playgroups with other dogs.
a majority of nonhuman primates get to retire to sanctuaries likeĀ peaceable primate sanctuary, and almost all dogs get retired and adopted out by organizations likeĀ homes for animal heroes. some institutions will also adopt out unneeded young rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, etc.
some strains of mice glow neon green (or orange or blue) under UV light. this is not harmful to them and is commonly seen in cancer research.
so yes, you can rest knowing that laboratory animals are treated with the utmost respect by their caretakers. and you can stop this awful, ignorant talk of human experimentation that will only end in the abuse of nonwhite people, LGBT people, disabled people, indigenous people, and so many others. please just take a look atĀ this wikipedia pageĀ if you think āethicalā human experimentation can exist.
If you want to reduce animal testing - or at least, reduce the amount of things we need animals to be tested with - there is some growing traction in regards to mathematical modelling (also known as in silico studies), in vitro studies (i.e. test tubes), and 3D printing of organoids.
At the moment, this is not a substitute for animal testing. Bodies are incredibly complex and interconnected environments that we're still scratching our heads about, and animal testing is in a lot of ways the most efficient and least harmful way of testing things like medications.
If anyone wants to read more about these subjects, here are a few starting points (you will probably learn some new words, this is okay!):
Advances and Applications of Predictive Toxicology in Knowledge Discovery, Risk Assessment, and Drug Development research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
Novel methods and technologies for the evaluation of drug outcomes and policies research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
Spotlight on Artificial Intelligence in Experimental Pharmacology and Drug Discovery research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
The Emerging Discipline of Quantitative Systems Pharmacology research topic by the Frontiers in Pharmacology journal
PDF Drug Combinations: Mathematical Modeling and Networking Methods by Vahideh Vakil and Wade Trappe
PDF Machine learning-based drug-drug interaction prediction: a critical review of models, limitations, and data challenges by Flaviu-Ioan Gheorghita et al.
PDF A review of 3D bioprinting for organoids by Zeqing Li et al.
3D Bioprinting for Engineering Organoids and Organ-on-a-Chip: Developments and Applications by Yuqing Ren, Congying Yuan, et al.
3D bioprinting of human iPSC-Derived kidney organoids using a low-cost, high-throughput customizable 3D bioprinting system by Jaemyung Shin, Hyunjae Chung, et al.
PDF Advancing organoid development with 3D bioprinting by Wenping Ma et al.
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I like the idea of Discord acting up and the others around him (Twilight mainly) casually mentioning how they could turn him into stone again (like Sophia and Dorothy, from The Golden Girls, as anytime Sophia does something inappropriate, Dorothy comes in with "Shady Pines, Ma!," "The Home, Ma!" or some variation of of it to get her in line again)
I have so many variations of incorrect quote I could do with this scenario. The idea of Discord skittering around like Sophia, right behind Twilight after she's said something like this, is just too funny.
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Hereās my Barbie CD collection! It took quite a while to get all of them. I wish there were more released after Secret Door, but with CDs being a dying medium, I can see why they didnāt.Ā Also most of them lost their original cases.
Princess and the Pauper Bonus Music CD
This is the bonus soundtrack that came with the DVD I got for my birthday. It has 7 of the 12 songs and I used to play it constantly when I got my first CD player.
Barbie Sings! The Princess Movie Collection
I had to hold back a squeal finding this one because I got it for 99 cents at Goodwill. It has all 12 songs from Princess and the Pauper, as well as the songs from Rapunzel, and music from Swan Lake and Nutcracker. It also has a booklet with pretty movie stills and lyric pages. Iām really happy to have this one.
Songs from Fairytopia
This is the cast recording for Barbie Live! In Fairytopia. I was able to get it on Amazon a few years back for cheap. Not my favorite musical, but it still has a lot of great songs. I still wish I couldāve seen this show, or that they released a professional recording of it on video/DVD.
The Barbie Diaries Movie Soundtrack
This one was VERY hard to find. It only came with a gift set version of the movie that my Grandmother ultimately got me for a birthday present. It sucks that there are only 5 songs on it, and none of them are sung by Skye Sweetnam! I was really hoping for a clean version ofĀ āNote to Selfā. Still, Iām glad I have it because I got to hear full versions of some of the songs that I couldnāt listen to online at the time. I feel a little bad that I lost the sleeve it came in.
Barbie Diaries Bonus CD Sampler
This came with my Barbie Diaries Barbie doll. It has 3 of the same songs as the soundtrack, so I didnāt get anything new unfortunately. The back of the cover did have official lyrics, though, so that is nice.
CHARMZ
Another SUPER hard find. I only have this one because I got it off a seller on eBay. Itās available on iTunes, but only in Australia, where the band is from. Charmz was a girl-band put together via a contest to promote The Barbie Diaries, and they shelled out this album of cover songs. The girls arenāt too bad for young teens, but I mostly got it for collectorās value as well as having a full version ofĀ āI Donāt Wanna Sleepā and those awesome karaoke tracks.
Magic of the Rainbow: Songs Inspired by the Movie
I found this one on a fluke while searching Amazon a few years back. I heard the trackĀ āI Must Be Strongā on YouTube and decided to buy the CD used from a seller. I donāt even know where or how this album came to be, but itās a really interesting find! Itās basically a musical re-telling of Magic of the Rainbow. I really like a couple of the tracks on it, but like CHARMZ itās mostly for collection purposes.
A Christmas Carol
It took me forever to get this one. I just couldnāt find it anywhere for a price that wasnāt totally outrageous. Thankfully, an eBay seller was merciful and sold it to me for just a few bucks. I adore Melissa Lyonsās voice, so having her sing Christmas songs is just nice. I like to have it playing in the background during the winter season.
Secret Door
I actually bought the digital version of the soundtrack when the film first came out, but once I discovered there was a physical copy too I just HAD to get it. The cover is really sparkly! And with it, my collection is complete!
