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A bitcoin millionaire created a haven for ‘anarcho-capitalists’ in Mexico. When one of his followers was killed, he said it was just the

John Galton and his girlfriend Lily Forester had finally made it. On a March 2017 evening, the young American couple sat on their balcony above Acapulco, Mexico, counting their blessings. They’d recently moved into a big house on a mountainside and were eyeing an ambitious push into the artisanal bong business.

Galton and Forester were anarcho-capitalists who slipped U.S. drug charges worth 25 years in prison, they said in a YouTube video that night. They’d hopped the border and resettled in what Galton called one of the world’s “pockets of freedom,” a community billed as a libertarian paradise.

Almost two years later, Galton was murdered.

Last week, gunmen burst into the couple’s mountaintop home, killing Galton on the spot, and seriously wounding one of the couple’s friends. (Forester survived, badly shaken.) The killers are presumed to be a drug cartel; Mexican authorities say Galton grew marijuana at the home.

Galton was part of a small community of fellow anarcho-capitalists formed by Jeff Berwick, who promised a drug-friendly haven and hosts the annual “Anarchapulco” festival. Berwick says Galton and Forester should’ve known what they were getting into.

“They started up a competing conference to Anarchapulco, called Anarchaforko and John continued to be involved in one way or another with the production or sale of plants,” Berwick told The Daily Beast in an email. “Unfortunately, that is the one thing that is very dangerous to do in Mexico as the drug cartels will attack anyone they see as competition and that appears to have happened to John.”

kosmonin

mysharona1987

bananonbinary

one of the hardest things to learn as a depressed former Gifted Kid™ is that half-assed is better than nothing. take the 50%, 40%, even 20% job. scrubbing your face is better than not taking a shower at all. picking up your clothes is better than never cleaning. nibbling on some bread is better than starving.

DO THINGS HALFWAY. NOW YOU’RE 100% BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE BEFORE.

redheadhatchet

One of my college professors used to say “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” I didn’t understand that for years because I didn’t do anything poorly, I couldn’t do anything poorly, I had to Do Everything Perfectly.

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting. Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible. Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible. Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly… because doing it poorly is better than not doing it.

atryl

To Kun-Lai!

Grand Expedition Yak from World of Warcraft (her name is Yams) Commission for Feril @ FurAffinity

glumshoe

It’d really suck if I got ice or water-themed superpowers. I’d have to wear blue and white and gray instead of the reds and oranges I prefer.

semoka

wear the reds and oranges and pull an iceland/greenland on em

glumshoe

“I have cornered you in this aquarium, where your fire powers are useless!”

“Fire powers? Dude, I’m an ice hero. I freeze shit and manipulate water. Also, I love aquariums. Thanks for the free entry!”

“But… you’re dressed like Guy Fieri…?”

“Yeah haha. I have an autumnal complexion.”

derpomatic

Also, no superhero should have a name that gives away the power set. Misdirection - “Get him, Lasereye!” “Haha, my mirror will deflect your, wait, why are you made of stone now?”

spookyghostiesandthings

They call him laser eye because he once blinded himself with a laser pointer and it was the funniest shit they’d ever seen

inkabelledesigns

This is my cup of tea.

2ndplacewins

In class we were talking about how cats teach themselves to hunt around their collar bells, and this dude followed that up with “well you know how Santa has those reindeer covered in those bells, right?”

and what he going for was “the bells on cat collars are the same that reindeer are pictured wearing”

But what *I* heard was “Santa’s Reindeer are predator animals that are covered in bells for our protection” and let me tell you I did not appreciate that.

snakebitcat

Just hear those slay bells jingling.

gowns

Don’t rub the money directly on your face.

The moral halo around “good skin” isn’t a coincidence. The behaviors associated with a clear, even-toned complexion require those who want it to reject hedonism in a way that is still deeply ingrained as virtuous in American culture; that the wealthy have mastered the look reinforces capitalistic notions of success and who achieves it (the ascetic, dedicated, and hardworking). The journalist Jaya Saxena found as much when she investigated the connections between skin and poverty earlier this year. “We assume those at the top are there because they’ve done something right. And if they have straight teeth, toned bodies, and smooth skin, that must be ‘right’ too,” she wrote. “It’s not that we think having bad skin is a moral failing. It’s that we think poverty is.”

mooniicorn

“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”

We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”

iamthethunder

Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.

rosslynpaladin

Or, backing up FURTHER

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.

vicecommanderhijikata

Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.

neddythestylish

I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.

But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.

I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.

grace-and-ace

“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”

coldalbion

Reblog for disability commentary.

oockitty

That last paragraph is absolutely important.

hazeldomain

“How come nobody ever heard of ‘dyslexia’ until widespread literacy became a thing?”

tddkart

Isabelle has a message for her enemies.

c3rvida3

Take your anxiety meds with Red Bull to create SLOWFAST, the hot new emotion teens are raving about!

SlowFast™: It Feels Incredibly Bad.

c3rvida3

“But wouldn’t they just cancel each other out?”

No.

They are both working so very much and I cannot stop it.

literalnobody

meghli

tariqah

What Nestle also did was file a lawsuit against activists and researchers who saw what it was doing, and said it can’t be held responsible for the deaths of millions because this was caused only by contaminated water. Recently enough, Nestle milk powder had larvae found in it and it’s instant noodles had lead in it

ororomunroedontpullout

Also Johnson and Johnson have been fighting and losing cases about their powder causing cases about their powder causing cancer. They’ve denied that and links to asbestos (which means they were lying as people died) and the cancer disproportionately effected Black women

theauspolchronicles

I’m so goddamn mad that oil companies have known climate change is real for decades and did everything to stop people from acting on it. I want to burn their offices down. I want to throw their CEOs into a fucking pit. The world is being destroyed because some filthy rich fucks saw the end coming and figured making money off it was better than saving it. That’s pure evil, plain and simple.

quasi-normalcy

Exxon knew about climate change almost 40 years ago and took steps to suppress the evidence

Likewise Shell.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is a documented historical fact, and people’s heads should literally be rolling for it.

captainsblogsupplemental

macgregor13mathers-deactivated2

https://wp.me/p8scYz-aGd

America’s Corrupt Health Insurance System

Posted on

July 6, 2017

Trish Nelson

ICYMI, while we’re on the topic of health care…

http://investmentwatchblog.com/

Did you know that before 1973 it was illegal in the United States to profit off of health care? The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 passed by Nixon changed everything.

Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally. And this is why the shameless pandering to robber baron corporations posing as “health providers” is such an egregious … and obvious … the tactic to do nothing more than plump up insurance company profits.

And do you know who’s to blame? Believe it or not, the downfall of the American health insurance system falls squarely on the shoulders of former President Richard M. Nixon.

In 1973, Nixon did a personal favour for his friend and campaign financier, Edgar Kaiser, then president and chairman of Kaiser-Permanente. Nixon signed into law, the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, in which medical insurance agencies, hospitals, clinics and even doctors, could begin functioning as for-profit business entities instead of the service organisations they were intended to be. And which insurance company got the first taste of federal subsidies to implement HMOA73 … *gasp* … why it was Kaiser-Permanente! What are the odds? It’s all right here to read for yourself.

And to perfectly cement, the Health Maintenance Organization Act (HMOA) of 1973 as the profiteering boondoggle that it actually was, the law Nixon mandated also included clauses that encouraged medical providers to not CURE afflictions, but to PROLONG them by only treating the symptoms. There’s no money to be made in CURING sickness. But the sky’s the limit when it comes to forcing people to endure repetitive doctor visits, endless (and often useless and redundant) tests, and … of course … let’s not forget the ever-increasing demand for American-made prescription drugs!

Have you noticed recently that the words “prolonged coma” and DEATH have wormed their way into the fast-spoken side-effects list of just about every new drug you see on television or hear on the radio? Death! From the medicine that’s supposed to cure you! You know what? I’ll take restless legs over DEATH.

So it’s an arms race between insurers, who deploy software and manpower trying to find claims they can reject, and doctors and hospitals, who implement their own forces to outsmart or challenge the insurers. And the cost of this arms race ends up being borne by the public, in the form of higher health care prices and higher insurance premiums. Of course, rejecting claims is a clumsy way to deny coverage. The best way for an insurer to avoid paying medical bills is to avoid selling insurance to people who really need it. An insurance company can accomplish this in two ways, through marketing that targets the healthy, and through underwriting: Rejecting the sick or charging them higher premiums. See the pattern?

https://thecriticalaye.com/2011/08/31/skyrocketing-health-care-costs-thanks-president-nixon/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/health/drugmakers-lawsuit-insulin-drugs.html

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/18/news/drug-pricing-mallinckrodt-ftc-fine/

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34320413