Ironhold

Bob Iger, the current CEO, is trying to reign back in the excesses that came in under former executives. In particular, Bob Chapek, his predecessor, allowed the studio heads to become feudal lords, giving them ultimate power over their little domains. Iger, however, is requiring the studio heads to be subordinate to the head of marketing and the head of distribution, the two people in the company who are supposed to be on the front lines of what people do and don't want. The idea is that these two will gate-keep ideas that won't be financially profitable at the market. The studio heads are revolting against this loss in power, particularly heads like Kathleen Kennedy who used their position to force their social and political views into place. Hence why anything and everything they can do to undermine Iger is fair game. This is why the business magazines are singing his praises but the entertainment trades are dog-piling on top of him. Iger donating to *both* political parties in order to curry favor no matter who is in power? That means he is, by definition, donating to the "wrong" causes and politicians, and so he is being targeted. It's the same thing that happened to indie video game developer Scott Cawthorn, the guy who created the "Five Nights at Freddy's" franchise of horror games. He was donating to politicians on both sides of the aisle, and the "progressive' crowd didn't like that.

You can also purchase so-called "parallel Bibles" that have 2+ translations positioned next to each other for study and comparison purposes. I have one somewhere that has four different translations.

Chapek is a business man, and so while the entertainment trades are tearing into him the business trades are standing by him. The issue with Disney is that Iger was so blinded by money he took his eyes off the day-to-day. This allowed corruption and incompetence to flourish, and by the time Chapek was put in charge it had taken firm root. Chapek's decision to have all studio heads report to the head of merchandising and the head of distribution was a key part in bringing people to heel and enforcing order by actually making people listen to folks who ostensibly monitor what is and isn't selling. But the prospect of actually having to be accountable is enough that the corrupt and incompetent within the company are freaking out. They know that if Chapek was any more hardball, let alone "one-time Marvel Comics editor Jim Shooter" levels of disciplinarian, they'd all be in deep, deep trouble. This latest round of things has turned over another rock, and the cockroaches that were living under it are therefore in a frenzy.

To expand on this point as it's something that comes up quite frequently in a lot of various discussions: In the United States, the term "creative work" is a deliberately broad legal term that encompasses a wide variety of produced materials, including religious texts. The way US copyright law works, copyrights are there to ensure that whoever creates a work will have a designated period of time to enjoy the fruits of their labors. That is, to say, they'll have time in order to monetize their work to make their money back on creating it, plus whatever profit they may gain. Because of this, US copyright law has considerations under which a work cannot receive a copyright under its own merit. When this situation is met, the work is said to be in the "public domain". The most common method by which a work passes into the public domain is, to put it simply, the passage of time. As noted above, copyrights were never intended to be permanent. If a work goes beyond a certain date, then the copyright expires and anyone can use it. Once a work goes into the public domain, anyone who wishes to seek a new copyright on it must do so by means of an "innovation" they create. For example, if you were to go to the Middle East, take some photos of various sites, and insert the photos into the text of the KJV, you could seek a new copyright on the basis of those photos. Things like this are why the KJV is in the public domain, but newer translations of the Bible and various other works are under copyright.

So far they've managed to destroy more museums (like a modern art museum and a museum of classic computer technology) than strategic targets.

As I've noted before, I had a severe reaction to the Moderna vaccine when I had it. In particular, the combination of the second shot and the heavy manual labor I had to do that same day because of my dad's poor planning spiked my blood pressure to the point that in hindsight I should have gone to the hospital because of how poorly I was feeling. It wasn't until a few months after I got the second shot that the Associated Press published a report stating that Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden were all restricting the use of the Moderna due to reports of heart inflammation in minors. As I have a pre-existing heart condition, had I known about this I would have requested a different vaccine. I now feel that I was lied to and that my life was needlessly endangered. I *refuse* to get any more boosters, and my mom, who was on my back about my getting vaccinated, has been apologizing profusely because of the consequences I faced. But my health hasn't fully recovered from what happened, and in fact this past winter I started having unusually bad nose bleeds above and beyond what I normally suffer during winter months due to how brittle my sinuses are from years of injury and illness. It's to the point now that I'll just start bleeding and not even realize I'm bleeding until I feel the blood in my facial hair or see it spill onto something below me.

There have been a number of instances in which Biden and Harris have either given non-answers to questions, fumbled over their own words, or outright refused to answer questions for one reason or another. No one quite knows what's going on, whether it's the result of the pair not being good in front of the microphone, the pair having mental issues, or the pair being under orders from handlers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War When Germany signed the treaty with Russia at the start of WWII, Russia decided this meant that they were free to invade Finland. While Finland wasn't able to hold out without foreign aid and was forced to surrender territory to Russia, the Finns did manage to inflict shocking casualties on the Russian military, the result of Russia going to war in winter with brightly-colored uniforms and using human wave tactics to overwhelm Finnish emplacements. When the war was over, Finland, like any civilized nation, returned all Russian soldiers taken prisoner during the conflict. Those soldiers that the Russian authorities didn't execute on the spot were shuffled off to the gulags. Russian military doctrine, you see, is "death or glory". You either win, or you go home in a bag. Surrender is seen as nothing less than desertion, if not treason. So by surrendering instead of dying in battle, they were seen as criminals and traitors. Between the casualties from the war and the returned soldiers who were killed by their own country, Russia lost so much in the way of military manpower that Germany tore up the treaty and ordered the invasion. Finland responded to the news by... becoming an Axis power, with many Finnish soldiers, such as Lauri Torni (the famous "Soldier of Three Armies") literally signing up for the German military in order to get revenge. Your average high school history textbook whistles past many graveyards, and this is one of them.

I'm trained in psychological warfare. A few other people here have likewise had training or other experience in fields that touch on mental illness and mental health. Quite a few posters have also had their own personal struggles with mental illness, either themselves or caring for someone else. This isn't a judgment rendered out of the blue.

The best guess anyone has is that he was likely in danger of being let go from the TV show he was on at the time, so he staged the attack to gain sympathy while making it too dangerous for the network execs to consider cutting the cast. Instead, independent media outlets and commentators like Tim Pool almost immediately pointed out how his story was implausible, causing the public to put pressure on law enforcement to investigate. The revelation that he'd faked the entire thing instead led to the show he was on being cancelled and Smollett himself being radioactive as far as the mainstream entertainment industry was concerned. At that point, he pretty much had to keep up the charade and keep the sympathy rolling in or else it would be the end of his entire career. The best he can hope for now is that his time in prison passes in peace, and that when he's released he can find some quiet but substantive - and likely menial - employment from where he can rebuild his work history and his reputation. He *might* convince people on the indie scene to give him another chance after people start to forget, but trying to rush into anything the moment he's out behind bars will just destroy his reputation further.

I'm a "rogue" entertainment writer, in that I operate on my own rather than follow the official narratives from Hollywood. Because of this, I have seen behind the curtain, and know that the wizard is but a mortal man with smoke and mirrors. As much as I would like to focus on highlighting the good within entertainment today (such as Kenneth Branaugh's "Poirot" movies, which have kept the spirit of the novels while adapting them for modern audiences), I also know that I - and others - must hold the industry to account if we wish to get rid of the bad within the industry (such as the editors at Marvel and DC who are functionally re-introducing segregation). A big part of this is admitting that yes, there are sectors within the broader entertainment industry where things have largely taken a few steps backwards and pushing for reform.

As an entertainment writer, I have to interject here. The sad, simple truth of the matter is that one can readily point to numerous examples where the entertainment industry is at a creative nadir right now. For example, it used to be that most major US comic book companies - Marvel, DC, Archie, and so on - had an organized system. You started out at the bottom, working on backup stories in larger books, filler issues, and so on. Once you proved yourself, you'd get more important assignments. If you hung around long enough and showed the higher-ups you were just that dependable, you could get a spot on a major title. Nowadays, however, that organized system has been all but scrapped, with many editors assigning people to projects based on factors unrelated to the experience or competence. In fact, industry veteran Christopher Priest once claimed that he left the majors for B-list publisher Dynamite because of racism; as he himself is black, many editors at these companies were only offering him positions writing black characters, the result of an obsessive focus on "authenticity" in the "voices" behind the characters. Essentially, Priest claimed that these editors would only assign people to projects if they were "just like" the characters they were working on, functionally creating ghettoes within the companies based on race, gender, and LGBT status. Couple this with nepotism being rampant in the industry and an "us vs. them" mindset that has pushed the industry to the verge of civil war, and the best & brightest in the industry are now struggling to make it big in the indies while most of the major publishing houses have to aspire to mediocrity for how terrible their people are. This has led to large numbers of comic book fans abandoning the major US publishers in whole or in part, and instead either going to indie houses or going to foreign titles, leaving even legacy superheroes with books who are shipping at numbers so low they'd have been cancelled back in the 1990s.

There's a Facebook group that has been set up, and there was talk about potentially setting up a Discord server. I'm already on Discord, where I'm a part of multiple servers and even a moderator for one of them, a server dedicated to various STEM topics such as meteorology and communications technology. I even posted an invite to the latter server if people wanted to jump on it and start probing around.

Speaking as an MBA: If a company is claiming to reach out to you, make sure they're not simply reaching for your wallet.

The Russian Navy and their marine complements have taken a major coastal city and are generally gaining a fair amount of territory. So while the Russian Army has largely collapsed, the Navy and Marines could well seize the country. What Ukraine needs is actual, direct military reinforcements from an organized military force, but no actual nation is willing to get involved right now lest it start WWIII. The best Ukraine can hope for right now is foreign mercenaries.

Each year, the State of Texas has a sales tax holiday on designated emergency preparedness items. The State Comptroller has posted the list of approved items for this year's sales tax holiday, which will be on April 23rd - 25th: https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/publications/98-1017.php?fbclid=IwAR2za70JSd2nLo7-eJXZ3i5PhVzx_NwzWHOzuK95TYtVzpzBaU7DTThZQ1w No state sales tax will be charged on approved items. Note that near the end of the document is a list of items that are *not* approved, its presence likely due to constant questions.

https://discord.com/invite/P5WrGCEum8 For those who want to tinker with Discord before any possible move, here's an invite to the GWES Discord, where I'm one of the moderators. It's centered around STEM (specifically meteorology and the communications systems used to generate alerts), and has a number of radio and TV enthusiasts as well.

It was originally created for gamers, and was meant to be disruptive to other social media platforms. Hence the name. Yes, I'm in several groups on Discord, including GWES, the Global Weather and Emergency Alert Society, where I'm a moderator.

The issue right now IMHO is how long Ukraine can hold out without direct military reinforcements from other countries. They're doing tremendous damage to the Russian Army, with the soldiers coming to realize that they are not actually "liberating" an "oppressed" country. It has also shown that the Russian military has terrible logistics and supply chains. The issue, though, is that the Russian Navy and their marine complement are lethally effective, meaning that they're a serious threat to the coastline and the cities thereon. Even though the northern and eastern offensives have stalled, the southern offensive is still going on.

As it is, there's the question of what anyone here might be doing to help promote the forums to others. That also helps engagement.

Pretty much. I've been on forums that continued to be "active" for years after the bulk of the users left for one reason or another. What kept the ones who remained was an overall sense of community and purpose.

I've seen it happen more than once where people were called into positions because of what they were supposed to be learning from being in those positions. Some rise to the occasion, such as when a sister in one congregation I was in had to get over her fear of public speaking in order to be a Sunday school teacher. Others don't, like the especially arrogant elder's quorum leader we had in another congregation who caused several brothers with personal issues to quit coming until after he'd gotten a work transfer elsewhere.

Just had a bit of ice here in Central Texas again, but most of it is already melting.

As a consequence of some mental health issues I'm dealing with, when I'm at my regular chapel* I've taken to having one ear bud in my ear so I can continue listening to a syndicated radio show I enjoy listening to (specifically, rebroadcasts of episodes of "American Top 40 with Casey Kasem" from the 1980s). Not only does this help keep me awake (I don't get a lot of sleep, part of my problems), it also gives me some positive energy (sometimes more so than church itself, to be honest) and helps keep me calm. If someone smarts off or is otherwise quite unwise with their words, I can just tune them out and listen to something far more pleasant. Many bishops would fly off the handle if they saw me doing that. My branch president has come to understand that even with one ear to my preferred form of music I'm still more attentive to what's around me than a lot of others. This came to a head when the younger men of the branch all proceeded to disappear right after sacrament was over one day, leaving me to actually break down the sacrament and clean the trays. Since then, he doesn't care what I'm listening to so long as I keep the volume down. *The stake center has electronic devices in place to interfere with streaming media and social media, meaning you can only do phone calls and whatever's already downloaded to your device.

As a follow-up to my post, something that might be worth discussing as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism There's a rather controversial hypothesis in the world of psychology which holds that people who are more depressed are more likely to grasp the nuances of certain situations and respond in a more appropriate fashion. A lot of what I've seen in life, and heard from others, does seem to indicate that the more pie-in-the-sky someone is, the less likely they are to actually try and work out the nuts and bolts of why a system isn't working, let alone take steps to fix it.