Ache with me.

This has been a common method for a long time in some states

It is still monarchy logic.

You are still advocating for monarchy logic.

It also does not prevent political assassinations, At All, because what you are describing is a hereditary oligarchy which has historically actually led to MORE assassinations, since now the assassins know exactly who will be getting into power which gives them the opportunity to groom a replacement and then assassinate the current guy.

"[Union Carbide Corporation] built the plant in Bhopal because of its central location and access to transport infrastructure. The specific site within the city was zoned for light industrial and commercial use, not for hazardous industry."

"[T]he facility [operated] with safety equipment and procedures far below the standards found in its sister plant in Institute, West Virginia."

"The local government was aware of safety problems but reticent to place heavy industrial safety and pollution burdens on the struggling industry because it feared the economic effects of the loss of such a large employer."

Among a number of other safety issues at play the night of the disaster, "The gas flare safety system was out of action and had been for three months."

"An estimated 3,800 people died immediately, mostly in the poor slum colony adjacent to the UCC plant. Local hospitals were soon overwhelmed with the injured, a crisis further compounded by a lack of knowledge of exactly what gas was involved and what its effects were."

"Immediately after the disaster, UCC began attempts to dissociate itself from responsibility for the gas leak. Its principal tactic was to shift culpability to UCIL, stating the plant was wholly built and operated by the Indian subsidiary. It also fabricated scenarios involving sabotage by previously unknown Sikh extremist groups and disgruntled employees but this theory was impugned by numerous independent sources."

"In a settlement mediated by the Indian Supreme Court, UCC accepted moral responsibility and agreed to pay $470 million to the Indian government to be distributed to claimants as a full and final settlement. The figure was partly based on the disputed claim that only 3000 people died and 102,000 suffered permanent disabilities. [...] Had compensation in Bhopal been paid at the same rate that asbestosis victims where being awarded in US courts by defendant [sic] including UCC – which mined asbestos from 1963 to 1985 – the liability would have been greater than the $10 billion the company was worth and insured for in 1984."

"At every turn, UCC has attempted to manipulate, obfuscate and withhold scientific data to the detriment of victims. Even to this date [2005], the company has not stated exactly what was in the toxic cloud that enveloped the city on that December night."

"[M]any [victims] responded well to administration of sodium thiosulfate, an effective therapy for cyanide poisoning but not MIC exposure. UCC initially recommended use of sodium thiosulfate but withdrew the statement later prompting suggestions that it attempted to cover up evidence of HCN [hydrogen cyanide] in the gas leak. The presence of HCN was vigorously denied by UCC and was a point of conjecture among researchers."

"UCC discontinued operation at its Bhopal plant following the disaster but failed to clean up the industrial site completely. The plant continues to leak several toxic chemicals and heavy metals that have found their way into local aquifers. Dangerously contaminated water has now been added to the legacy left by the company for the people of Bhopal."

"The events in Bhopal revealed that expanding industrialization in developing countries without concurrent evolution in safety regulations could have catastrophic consequences. The disaster demonstrated that seemingly local problems of industrial hazards and toxic contamination are often tied to global market dynamics."

"UCC has shrunk to one sixth of its size since the Bhopal disaster in an effort to restructure and divest itself. By doing so, the company avoided a hostile takeover, placed a significant portion of UCC's assets out of legal reach of the victims and gave its shareholder and top executives bountiful profits. The company still operates under the ownership of Dow Chemicals and still states on its website that the Bhopal disaster was "cause by deliberate sabotage"."

However angry you are about the Bhopal disaster, you're not angry enough.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

Via Authors Against Book Bans - May 29, 2026

Three federal book ban bills are currently alive in the United States Congress:

HR 7661

Status: Passed out of committee; to be introduced in the House Would amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to prohibit federal funds from being used for any material deemed “sexually oriented.” Buried within that definition is language that includes material that “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” While framed as protecting children, the bill opens the door to banning books that include LGBTQ+ characters, defining trans existence as inherently inappropriate, and narrowing literature toward a prescribed, limited canon. In short: Would treat any LGBTQ+ identity as sexual content.

HR 2616

Status: Passed the House; referred to a Senate committee Would withhold ESEA funding from schools that “teach or advance concepts related to gender ideology,” using definitions from Executive Order 14168. It frames itself as protecting children. In practice, it represents another attempt to eliminate not only trans and nonbinary books, but also any acknowledgment of gender non‑conforming people in public education. In short: Would deny the existence of trans and nonbinary people.

HR 8705

Status: Passed out of committee; to be introduced in the House Rather than naming specific books or categories of literature, it blocks federal funding for American History and Civics Education from being used to promote what it calls “discriminatory equity ideology” or “gender ideology,” definitions drawn from a January 29, 2025 executive order. Likely impacts would include fewer books on racism and civil rights, less discussion of sexism and inequality, narrower civics curricula, and publishers pulling back on diverse perspectives. In short: A funding lever that shapes whose version of history gets taught.

HR 7661 and HR 8705 are still in the House, so please call your representative and tell them to oppose both bills. Click here to find the phone number of your representative’s office.

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.