Workin' 9 to 5

What a way to make a livin'

Barely gettin' by

It's all takin' and no givin'

They just use your mind

And you never get the credit

It's enough to drive you crazy

If you let it

9 to 5, yeah

They got you where they want you

There's a better life

And you think about it, don't you?

It's a rich man's game

No matter what they call it

And you spend your life

Puttin' money in his wallet

Some excerpts:

The area has a history of strange happenings long before Aleister Crowley moved in. The parish of Boleskine was formed in the 13th Century. A Kirk and graveyard were built in the parish around this time. A succession of Ministers ran Boleskine Parish and would travel the area on horseback or on foot in all weather conditions. Minister Thomas Houston (1648–1705) was said to have had the task of hastily laying animated corpses back in their graves after a devious local wizard had raised the dead in Boleskine graveyard.

Boleskine House was built on the site of the kirk, which, according to legend, caught fire during congregation and killed everyone inside

Crowley believed the location was ideal to sequester himself to perform a series of operations known as the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, taken from a grimoire called The Book of Abramelin.

According to Crowley, in his book The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, in order to perform the operations "the first essential is a house in a more or less secluded situation. There should be a door opening to the north from the room of which you make your oratory. Outside this door, you construct a terrace covered with fine river sand. This ends in a 'lodge' where the spirits may congregate."

The purpose of this ritual is to invoke one's Guardian Angel.

It requires at least 6 months of preparation, celibacy, and abstinence from alcohol. However, it also includes the summoning of the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell, to bind them and remove their negative influences from the magician's life. Whilst Crowley was in the process of performing the lengthy ritual, he was called to Paris by the leader of the Golden Dawn. According to legend, he never banished the demons he had summoned, leading to strange happenings occurring in and around Boleskine House.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51071085

Featuring:

• Chris Cornell
• Jeff Ament
• Matt Cameron
• Stone Gossard
• Mike McCready
• Eddie Vedder

I will show for you

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50950096

Education Department staff on Friday suggested ending the American Bar Association’s ability to oversee law school programs across the country amid fierce Republican criticism of the organization.

The association has had government approval to oversee law schools since 1952, but agency staff said its next renewal bid should be denied because of alleged conflicts of interest. The association was last approved to accredit nearly 200 law schools in 2021, with its oversight authority up for review next month.

The recommendation marks a major development in President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape the college oversight system, which he has criticized as too liberal. Critics fear this will politicize the accreditation process, but the department’s skepticism of close relationships between accreditors and trade associations is shared across the political aisle.

Accreditors are the nongovernmental agencies tasked with reviewing educational quality. For freestanding law schools that aren’t affiliated with a university, the ABA determines if the school can accept federal student aid.

Written after the collapse of his marriage to Princess Leia

Education Department staff on Friday suggested ending the American Bar Association’s ability to oversee law school programs across the country amid fierce Republican criticism of the organization.

The association has had government approval to oversee law schools since 1952, but agency staff said its next renewal bid should be denied because of alleged conflicts of interest. The association was last approved to accredit nearly 200 law schools in 2021, with its oversight authority up for review next month.

The recommendation marks a major development in President Donald Trump’s efforts to reshape the college oversight system, which he has criticized as too liberal. Critics fear this will politicize the accreditation process, but the department’s skepticism of close relationships between accreditors and trade associations is shared across the political aisle.

Accreditors are the nongovernmental agencies tasked with reviewing educational quality. For freestanding law schools that aren’t affiliated with a university, the ABA determines if the school can accept federal student aid.

History of Aura

Introduction:

On social media, Palestinians risk everything to livestream their own destruction. Phones held up in Gaza broadcast homes turned to rubble, children rescued from dust, and the sounds of warplanes overhead. However, Meta Platforms throttle, silence, or erase these livestreams. Moreover, officials tell the world that humanitarian aid is coming, that the global community is responding, while the Israeli government holds up convoys, blocks trucks at the border, and lets supplies rot or be diverted. As a result, Palestinians livestream genocide while the promised lifeline never arrives.

Meanwhile, in Sudan, armed RSF militias drive women to mass suicide, forcing them to choose death over the certainty of sexual violence. These militias abduct children and sell them into slavery, treating their lives as commodities. Instead of isolated tragedies, these patterns reveal systemic violence in a world where “humanitarian aid” is absent, withheld, or weaponised.

At first glance, many people imagine humanitarian aid as compassion in action—neutral, benevolent, and offered as a lifeline in the face of disaster. The term evokes convoys of food, medical supplies, clean water, blankets, and the comforting belief that the world does not abandon the vulnerable. In reality, aid is rarely neutral. It is conditional, surveillance, and political.

Furthermore, state-backed NGOs and international institutions often step into crises not to dis- mantle the systems causing dispossession but to manage them instead. The very governments that fund these organisations are often the same ones arming occupations and waging wars. Aid becomes another theatre of control, one that sorts people into categories of “deserving and “undeserving,” keeping survival contingent on donor approval and international optics.

Ultimately, this system produces double violence. First, occupying forces displace, starve, assault, and enslave communities. Then, when survivors turn to the world for help, aid systems track, catalogue, and discipline them. Survivors must prove their suffering in donor-friendly terms; their dignity shrinks into line items on an accountability report. Therefore, humanitarian relief often enforces “chronic temporariness”—a perpetual state of limbo that keeps people alive but never free. In contrast, out of this machinery of harm, something different emerges: mutual aid. When institutions abandon them, people turn to one another. Palestinians reaching out via social media, risking their dignity in capitalist platforms, prompt many in the US and Europe to start crowdfunding on their behalf through platforms such as GoFundMe or Chuffed. Likewise, in Sudan, volunteers deliver food where aid agencies retreat. In Congo, communities build survival networks against centuries of extraction. These are not acts of charity but of solidarity. Mutual aid is survival work that refuses the hierarchies of donor and recipient. It restores the redistributive ethic that state-run charities and global NGOs have hollowed out.

Against this evidence, this essay traces how humanitarian aid has become a tool of empire; how Palestinians, Sudanese, and Congolese expose its failures; how the states co-opted Islam’s zakat and sadaqah into bureaucratic spectacle; and why mutual aid matters as the humane alternative. To understand this fully, we must set aside the comforting myth of aid as compassion and recognise instead the systems of power it sustains.

Dr. Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist at Harvard, a 2x Pulitzer Prize finalist, and author of notable works like The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now.

We discuss his research on the psychology of common knowledge and what it means for democracy in a time of infinite AI slop and social media confusion.

We also dive into deeper philosophical questions on AI consciousness and rogue AI — note that this was recorded before the recent Hugging Face incident, making our commentary especially urgent.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1275280