Employer: “Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?”
Me:
I love this because you could mean anyone in th picture, including the bear.
You made this 1000x better
Who wouldn’t aspire to be a stylishly dressed Were-bear with a beautiful nude woman on their back providing musical accompaniment as you drive unwanted trespassers from the steps of your stately residence?
Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.
Belle: Beast, I have to go back to my father, your magic mirror showed he was sick.
Beast: Really? Let me see…. Huh, actually it look like some guy called Gaston is going to have him committed.
Belle: What now? *Grabs mirror*
Beast: you know that guy? he seems like a douche.
Belle: Beast…. Honey…. you wanna get out of the house for a few hours?
Beast: Against my better judgement, I’m gonna say yes.
*Later*
Belle: FLEE MORTALS, I AM ARTEMIS, GODDESS OF THE WILD HUNT, AND I HAVE COME FOR YOU.
Beast: HEY NOT THAT I’M NOT HAVING FUN BUT WHY ARE YOU NAKED?
Belle: ARTEMIS, GODDESS OF THE WILD HUNT DOES NOT REQUIRE CLOTHES.
Beast: I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS SIDE OF YOU BEFORE AND I’M NOT GONNA LIE I KIND OF DIG IT.
Belle: YEAH I’M HAVING FUN TOO. HEY ITS LEFOU, GASTON’S LITTLE CHEERLEADER. GET HIM!
Beast: YES MA’AM!
Fairy: *Watching in the distance*: You know I was gonna turn him back, but it looks like they’re having fun so I’ll come back tomorrow.
For those who are unaware, this is an illustration from an actual scene in the first Witcher book in the retelling of the BatB story :D The Beast and one of his many lady friends did this for the lulz every time people came to rescue the “poor maiden” and slay the monster.
A federal watchdog concluded President Trump broke a law when he froze assistance funds for Ukraine last year, according to a report unveiled on Thursday.
The White House has said previously that it believed Trump was acting within his legal authority.
Trump’s decision to freeze military aid appropriated by Congress is at the heart of impeachment proceedings against the president that are shifting venues this week from the Democratically controlled House to the majority-Republican Senate.
Democratic lawmakers have accused Trump of abusing his office by withholding hundreds of millions in assistance in order to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals.
The Office of Management and Budget blocked the Defense Department from spending money designated by Congress on July 25, “pending a policy decision,” according to OMB General Counsel Mark Paoletta. That hold was lifted on September 12.
But a 1974 law that governs budget procedure within the government “does not permit OMB to withhold funds for policy reasons,” said Thomas Armstrong, general counsel for the GAO.
The benefits of remunicipalisation fall into two broad categories: first, correcting what has gone wrong in our cities after decades of privatisation, profit-extraction and waste; and second, forging a new sense of the public good.
“The privatisation and outsourcing of the last 30-40 years has failed,” says Cat Hobbs of the Oxford-based campaigning organisation We Own It. . “It tends to cost us more, it means that we get worse services, we have less control over them, and there is less democratic accountability to us, the public.
“But it’s also a moral question. We’re often talking about natural monopolies like water, where competition doesn’t make sense, and the market doesn’t really belong. When we talk about ‘people not profit’, everyone understands that.”
The alternative, she argues, is one in which public ownership at the local level can ensure there are better, more stable jobs for communities, prioritising sustainability rather than dividends for shareholders. From social care to libraries to refuse collection, privatisation has cut these services to the bone.
Remunicipalisation could resonate particularly well in the UK, because it speaks to some of the same political shifts that led to Brexit. …
… The local services brought back into public ownership range from social care programmes in Selangor, Malaysia to privatised housing in Berlin, Germany; from waste services in Winnipeg, Canada to public transport cleaning in Seoul, South Korea. The report brims with success stories: the Chileans benefiting from dramatically lower drug prices since 40 new public pharmacies were created; the 141 new publicly-owned telecommunication providers in Chattanooga, Tennessee providing internet service to locations where private companies had decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. There has been a 47% cut to electricity use in street lighting in the Bulgarian city of Dobrich since it was remunicipalised in 2018, when the local government installed energy-efficient LED bulbs. …
… “YouTube has previously taken welcome steps to protect its users from anti-vaccine and conspiracy theories,” Avaaz argued, “but has not acted with equal force against broader misinformation and disinformation content, including climate misinformation.”
The group called on YouTube to implement new policies to prevent the further spread of climate misinformation on its platform. It said the site should:
• Include climate misinformation in its “borderline content” policy, which limits the algorithmic distribution of videos that do not reach the bar required to fully remove them from the site.
• Demonetise misinformation, “ensuring such content does not include advertising and is not financially incentivised. YouTube should start immediately with the option for advertisers to exclude their ads from videos with climate misinformation.”
• Work with independent fact-checkers to inform users who have seen or interacted with verifiably false or misleading information.
• Provide transparency to researchers by releasing data showing how many views are driven to misinformation by its own recommendation algorithms. …
Besides the litanies of Re, we find the vignette of Chapter 151 of the Book of the Dead. It represents the mummification of the dead king under the protection of Anubis, Isis, Nephthys and the four sons of Horus.
New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty, ca. 1292-1189 BC. Detail on the ceiling in the Tomb of Siptah (KV47), Valley of the Kings, West Thebes.
