Black humor doesn’t work when your company figures largely in responsibility for the mess.

That’s partner swapping, or wife swapping in the mid 20th century, which is a subset of swinging. Plenty of swinging is bunches of people in a pile, or mingling and pairing. They’re supposed to be consent and boundary conscious, but are not always (especially when booze or drugs get involved) which is the primary source of sore feelings and getting uninvited to future events.

Are pineapple swim trunks the code for availability to swing?

This wouldn’t be the first clothing code I’ve encountered.

Um, yes?

NGOs often face situations in which the people that need humanitarian aid cannot be reached because a belligerent interest intercepts all supply. This is how we ended up with ad-hoc military support vehicles (say a pickup with a machine-gun mount) being called a technical since it and its crew would be budgeted in as technical services since Red Cross can’t exactly say they hired some goons to stand guard while they dispensed first aid services.

So when NGOs scout a new region to support and ask the local villages what they need, it’s super common to hear well, our biggest problem is the warlord up-river who keeps sending guys with guns to take all our stuff. And since NATO isn’t interested in sorting that out, it’s up to our peace-corps crew to think about how to provide an ad-hoc balance of power.

The problem is with a village with nothing but pointed sticks, one or two guys with an AK-47 can throw the balance or power so far that the village is forced to capitulate to the warlord. And it’s not that the NGOs are consulting with an arms dealer (which is how the warlord is getting his guns), so they’re improvising, which sometimes means 3D printing gun parts and then smithing them locally.

As per most crisis hot spots in the world, few things are simple, and so yes, NGOs that are supposed to be non-violent (and even will present themselves as such to the international community) will resort to ad-hoc violence or violence-adjacient solutions. IRL is often messy.

Oh, the original notion in the post of the practice of killing offspring past the heir and the spare. Your response was ambiguous about to what specifically it was reacting.

Oh it’s worse than that. According to a History Channel special on the Kafes (take that for what you will) the prisoners behaved as folks generally do, and developing relationships with their lovers, but getting pregnant was a capital offense (since niblings were additional political baggage), and they often would get pregnant. This contributed to the mental health deterioration of the imprisoned men.

Um, fratricide is a real world practice.

In fact, the Kafes of the Ottoman Empire were an effort to stop the ritual of a successor king having all his brothers executed. Instead, extra heirs would be locked up in a nice dwelling full of harem women. They went mad.

And now they are a tourist attraction and a footnote of history.

It was published in 1968, and to give you an idea of how bad things were Michelle Remembers was published in 1980, was regarded as factual and featured Mary, Mother of Jesus coming to save Michelle from a Satanic ritual, and that wasn’t enough of a hint to stop the book from being used as evidence in courts of law.

And yes, Bananadine was a hoax and Powell bought into it and he poo-pooed toad licking and it’s real (look up Colorado River Toad. I explain it in another comment). So yes, Powell was convinced despite his best diligence. We should be grateful for the wisdom of the internet (warts, worts and all).

I could see how he might change his opinion, and later adopt a philosophy of nonviolence. But at this point there are some valid concerns regarding global catastrophic risks that we may not be able to confront without violent action. For a deeper dive on it, consider Sophie From Mars’ video The World Is Not Ending ( on YouTube ) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm which confront that either we face that capitalism will kill us and collectively stop doing it, or we, as a species, perish. And the sooner we can make that change, the less stark our future will be.

And in that regard, Powell’s practical instructions might still see some proper use.

Oh, lots of things. But for one thing, Powell wouldn’t mock the Colorado River Toad the way he did in the first book (or commenting facetiously about his buddy who suggested smoking toad skins ) since it’s an actual thing. Incilius alvarius’ defensive poison has actual hallucinogenic and psychotropic properties.

The poison on the back of a typical toad can kill a dog, so be careful, or it will fuck you up. First nations folk would actually lick the toads and just suffer the bad trip until they got accustomed to the toxins. But that’s a rough ride.

Since the late twentieth century cultivators would raise and milk toad venom and then distill the desired chemistries into a powder that can be ingested or smoked (much like cannibis, rolled into cigarettes, smoked from a pipe or mixed into edibles), hence yeah, when Powell heard about it, it registered as smoking toad skins though thankfully, the frogs survive the process.

Powell’s 'tude about drugs was informed by the 60s mind-expansion movement to try different stuff and see what broadens your perspective. And so the 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine / bufotenin cocktail would actually fit right into his philosophy. If I remember right, he talked about trying peyote, which was a really bad trip for him.

All that said, there’s self-awareness related stuff that I would want to throw in, since the western psychiatric model is not great for dealing with mental illness or for reconciling living in a toxic society. Drugs are commonly used to self medicate but even then can be so much more effective when we’re aware that’s what we’re doing, and this is a point often missed in drug culture, in recovery culture and in the mental health sector all together.

Homeless, immigrants and LGBT+ are always first. Poor and undesirable countercultures rapidly follow. Soon some jobs won’t be patriotic enough.

The thing NGOs do in Africa is 3D print AK gun parts to be used to make molds to fill in where captured gun parts are lacking so that resistance groups against warlords can be better armed.

That’s how it all started. Guys in planes with handguns.

The French eventually put a forward-mounted gun on the plane but had to install deflectors on the prop that would protect it from bullets. On the German side Fokker developed an interrupter gear to be mounted onto the Fokker Eindekker which prevented the mounted gun from discharging when the propeller was in the way. It wasn’t perfect, but better than the deflectors.

ETA: The story goes that Fokker himself went up to demonstrate the forward-mounted machine-gun with the interrupter gear, but once he got behind an Allied scouting plane, he didn’t have the heart to kill the crew. It didn’t take long, before other pilots gladly started shooting down enemy planes.

With biplanes, guns were sometimes mounted on the upper wing to evade the problem, though eventually the central powers developed their own interrupter gear mechanism.

Note that those flying contraptions were considered more valuable than pilots, and they were sent up without parachutes in order to given them incentive to return with the plane, or at least get it to the ground with less damage. As I flew WWI flying simulations, I noticed I had a while to think up some good last words while staring at the looming ground. Too bad no one would ever hear them.

Women’s circles, usually connected to lesbian and witchy communities will keep track of doctors who will perform tubal ligations or other sterilization techniques on demand, because it is so common for doctors to refuse women’s personal choices about fertility.

And every time there’s a big policy event that threatens family planning and reproductive rights, another bloc of women go for appointments to seek long-term and permanent contraception, because pregnancy is too much of a liability to leave up to chance, especially in anti-abortion states which have little to no maternity services either (all the OBGYNs closed shop and left).

It’s entirely about loyalty and institutionalized stratification. Laws are meant to constrain those outside the party, while those within the party are given a lot of latitude.

Either the bank of the nation / institution of Evil, or more likely, the vault in which evil, the substance, is stored, quantified and traded as a commodity.

In the 70s and 80s, having a neopagan faith was grounds enough to have your kids yanked from you and put into the foster system. Similarly if you have BDSM tackle and / or dress, even if it never came out when the kids were about.

They dont just want to take us back to the days when everyone had to hide in their closet, but they’re deternined to pack everyone into closets, including their own that have kinks, disabilities, family with shameful pasts or whatever.

Project 2025 is not a rational model for society, which is why it will need fascist features including enemy-within rhetoric and eventually a war effort.

So it’s super important we don’t have another Black Swan election like 2016. Also I hope DHS is actually prepared for violent coup d’etat and civil war, should the GOP lose the election and procedural coup d’etat shenanigans fail.

Women’s Ska.

💖&💖

< rant >

Since WWII, we’ve taken all our interrogation cues from this guy, who was so effective at getting information from POWs and enemy agents that his methods inform modern techniques in the industrial world.

We knew all this well before the whole Abu Ghraib controversy in 2003 and CIA’s Extrajudicial Detention and Enhanced Interrogation program, as did the very guys who developed the program.

So they not only committed crimes against humanity, but can’t even fall back on justifications of war. During the international war on terror, the US tortured POWs, civilians and even Americans because some rich people and officials wanted Arab Muslims to suffer for their own gratification, and no other reason.

It was the moment that I realized the US (my own country) are, in fact, the baddies.

Yes, CIA did engage in some irregular interrogation methods during the cold war, often in dealing with counter-espionage situations, but even then it wasn’t regarded as an acceptable torture method. KGB, similarly, at least once fed a caught mole feet first into a blast furnace while the rest of the staff watched. It sent a message but fucked morale for weeks.

Torturing others reminds us we human beings are still beasts who sometimes pretend to be civilized but still can’t help ourselves but go on our feelies, often showing the world just how sore a loser we can be. We have to try harder, maybe get clever, to do better.

< /rant >