Liberty Daily posted a portion of Owen Shroyer explaining his reasons for leaving Infowars and Alex Jones’ cursing rant against Owen, saying he lied about him. I don’t know much about Infowars but they are in danger of folding over endless lawsuits by the parents of Sandy Hook. In the first clip, Owen says Alex […] The post The Battle of the Infowars Titans appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Democrat policies align with the World Economic Forum and UN. They are putting an end to the private farm. Wall Street wants to control our food supply – it’s lucrative. Dr. St. Onge discusses it in the clip. We have lost half a million, one in five farms, since 1980. The government has given corporate […] The post The US Lost Half a Million Farms appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

MINNEAPOLIS — A strong wind was blowing as Vice President JD Vance’s motorcade pulled up in front of a Minneapolis church. It blew the vice president’s tie over his shoulder as he walked, and scattered Usha Vance’s hair as she took her husband’s hand.  High above them loomed Annunciation Catholic Church, where a frenzied shooter in his twenties opened fire on children attending the first school mass of the year. Two children were killed, and many more were injured. Vance and his wife each carried a bouquet to honor the slain children, and they walked slowly up the steps to the church, reading the sidewalk chalk messages spread out before them. Thousands of donated flowers lined the walkway. They paused in front of a statue of Mary, whom the church is named after, setting their bouquets in a basket before her. Someone had placed a small bouquet in the statue’s hand, and a long rosary dangled from her arm. Vance pointed out the inscription above her head to his wife: “This is the house of God and the gate of heaven.”  No one spoke as they looked up at the church in apparent prayer, Vance making the sign of the cross. Even the protestors across the street barely made a sound. Then the Vances quietly went towards the church to meet the families whose children had been taken from them forever.  (Photo by Alex Wroblewski-Pool/Getty Images) Ten-year-old Harper Moyski and 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel each had their own hopes and dreams, Vance reflected to reporters before he boarded Air Force Two to return to Washington. They were energetic, silly, beautiful children, beloved by their families, who never imagined they would lose them so soon. Their friends commemorated them outside the church by writing little messages to the deceased youngsters on grave-like crosses erected under a little tent.  “We will miss you,” a young hand wrote.  “God be with you, I’m in your class,” scrawled another.  “You were so loved,” the messages read, over and over and over.  The vice president and his wife spent several hours speaking not only with Harper’s and Fletcher’s parents, but also with the parents of the injured children. They went to the Minnesota Children’s Hospital and met young Lydia Kaiser, who was recovering from surgery, and spoke with Weston Halsne, another victim, over the phone.  The scene outside Annunciation Catholic Church, where the VP and Second Lady are currently paying their respects. Thousands of flowers line the walkway. Messages of love and hope are written in sidewalk chalk and painted on stones. One reads: “God is our refuge and strength.” pic.twitter.com/wH0Az27B1a — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) September 3, 2025 The vice president described the visit as “heart breaking” but “gratifying,” sharing that the parents “opened up their lives, opened up their hearts” to the Vances, speaking about their children and about their families and about the community that has rallied around them.  And they asked him, Vance said, to speak not of the “brutal maniac” who slaughtered their children, but to speak of the “innocent children who lost their lives, and were full of life, and were people, people with hopes and dreams in their own right.”  He emphasized that message by speaking of the children himself.  “I wish that we talked a lot more about Harper, who was a beautiful young girl, who had a beautiful smile, the kind of smile that would turn a bad day into a good one,” Vance reflected, adding that Harper was “very proud of the fact that she just had her first communion a couple years ago.” “I also wish we talked a little bit more about Fletcher,” he went on. “Fletcher was a very rambunctious and energetic kid. Was a beautiful kid. Had an incredible head of hair…” Fletcher’s father, Vance, revisited the chapel with him where the shooter killed his son.  “That was the first time he had been in the chapel since his son was taken from him,” Vance said.  And the vice president himself echoed the grieving parents’ request: “We should talk more about these kids. We should talk less about the shooter, the crazy person who took these children from us. We should talk about these kids, their hopes and their dreams, and the fact that they had a full life ahead of them that was cut short.”  Lydia Kaiser, who received a visit from the vice president and the second lady on Wednesday, was just recovering from surgery. According to a GoFundMe set up in her name, Lydia was injured while she was protecting her little “buddy” — a younger student whom she was supposed to keep an eye on and help behave throughout mass. “Her father, our community’s beloved gym teacher, was also in attendance and helped secure the room, to keep children safe, and stuck with them all until they were reunited with their families,” the GoFundMe says, “even while his daughter was entering the emergency room. Lydia and Harry are two heroes in our midst.”  Weston wasn’t well enough to meet the vice president in person, but he and his family did speak with the Vances over the phone. Vance, who had maintained a somber demeanor the entire day, broke into a big smile when The Daily Wire asked about Weston.  “Usha and I spoke to him,” Vance told The Daily Wire, as Usha also smiled. “He had just got out of surgery so we weren’t able to see Weston, but we did talk to him on the phone. Just a little boy, thank God full of life, happy, recovering well.” U.S. Vice President JD Vance speaks to the press after paying his respects to victims of the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting on September 3, 2025, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski-Pool/Getty Images) “I told him, he has a 15 year old older brother, I said, you can tell him from the vice president of the United States that your older brother has to be nice to you for at least the next week,” the vice president said. “Weston was very excited to hear that. But just a really beautiful family and I’m glad that he’s doing well.”  Yet even as Vance shared the message of the parents: to focus on their children and not on the shooter, the tragedy of that shooting and the many ways in which it could have been prevented loomed like a spectre over the day.  Protestors littered the streets near the church, advocating for gun control. Across the street, big signs were taped to the fence facing Annunciation church, reading: “Protect kids, not guns.” Beside them hung a massive transgender flag — an acknowledgment of the shooter’s trans-identification. Bloomberg’s Kate Sullivan asked if Vance had heard about Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz call for a special legislative session to consider potential gun laws, but Vance would not get mired in the politics of gun legislation, telling her, “I’m not going to tell Minnesota lawmakers or the governor exactly how they should respond to this tragedy.”  He did say emphatically: “There is a strong desire from across the political spectrum to do something so that these shootings are less common.”  The Daily Wire questioned Vance about the rise in trans-identifying shooters and whether authorities should be focusing on gender dysphoric individuals showing warning signs. Vance did not specifically mention the shooter’s gender identity issues, but he stressed that the parents he spoke with want authorities to be taking a serious look at the root causes.  “Certainly we should be investigating people who are planning on targeting kids, and I think that one of the unfortunate lessons of this particular shooting is that this person who showed clear signs of derangement, slipped through the cracks,” Vance told The Daily Wire.  He explained that the parents he spoke with came from across the political spectrum, describing them as “rational” and “reasonable” despite their grief.  “Every single parent I spoke to wants something to happen,” he said.  “I can’t imagine what I would be like in this moment of heartbreak, and all they asked is that we look very seriously at the root causes, that we look very seriously at the ways to prevent crazy people who are about to shoot up a school from getting access to firearms, these are things that a lot of us have talked about for a very long time.” “These parents are grieving,” he added, “but they certainly want us to look at everything that we can possibly do so that the next family doesn’t have to deal with this.” Tributes to Harper (10) and Fletcher (8), who Robert Westman shot and killed last week as they were praying at their first school mass of the year. pic.twitter.com/ivIMlivdjk — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) September 3, 2025 Both Vance and his wife appeared emotionally impacted by the weight of the day — Usha Vance looked particularly sad, and she didn’t speak to the reporters gathered under the wing of Air Force Two, returning to the plane with her husband with a smile and wave.  Vance himself appeared to have a catch in his voice as he reflected on his takeaways from the day.  “I’ve had a lot of good days, a lot of interesting days…but I’ve never had a day that will stay with me like this day did,” he said.  One little girl remains in serious condition, Vance said, and he looked into the camera to issue a plea to his fellow Americans.  “If you are the praying type, say a prayer for this innocent girl, who is actually in surgery right now, that the swelling will go down, that she will be ok, because she’s still in the fight for her life, and every single family to a person is desperate that the death toll which currently is at two, stays at two,” he said.  As for himself, Vance knows that there is nothing he, or anyone else, can say that will take away the grief that these parents are feeling. He plans to honor these grieving parents and their innocent children, “by being a better dad, and hugging my kids tight tonight, and making sure that they know that their dad loves them.” “Because there are two families who are not going to get that opportunity ever again,” he said.  “There are families in Minneapolis who will never get to do that again.” 

WASHINGTON —  In the wake of the latest deadly attack on a school by a transgender-identifying individual, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is considering blocking trans-identifying individuals from buying firearms, The Daily Wire has learned. “Individuals within the DOJ are reviewing ways to ensure that mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell,” one source inside the Justice Department told the Daily Wire. The DOJ’s discussions center on the fact that individuals who identify as transgender suffer from gender dysphoria, a mental disorder, the DOJ source familiar with the conversations shared with The Daily Wire. Gender dysphoria describes the sense of unease that a man or woman may feel if he or she thinks that their biological sex is mismatched with their so-called gender identity. A DOJ spokesman would not comment on specific measures being considered, but said that a “range of options” are on the table. “Under Attorney General Bondi’s leadership this Department of Justice is actively considering a range of options to prevent mentally unstable individuals from committing acts of violence, especially at schools,” the spokesman said. Given the rise in transgender violence over the past decade, particularly aimed at school children, many on the right have argued that authorities should be taking a much closer look at the warning signs exhibited by transgender shooters. Last week’s deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, in which trans-identifying shooter Robin Westman killed two children and injured many more, has prompted calls from the right to investigate transgender domestic terrorism. The Daily Wire reported this week that the White House’s draft national security strategy on domestic terrorism will specifically address transgender violence. US Department of Justice (DOJ) headquarters building on January 20, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images) Westman’s actions came only two years after another trans-identifying killer, this one a woman who identified as a man, targeted Christian school children in Nashville. One week later, leaders of Catholic and independent schools in Minnesota had called on Governor Tim Walz to help prevent similar shootings, as The Daily Wire reported earlier this week. They feared that the next shooter would target one of their schools, but the security funding was never authorized. That same year, Walz was working to protect transgenders, signing legislation establishing Minnesota as a “trans refuge,” and promising to “protect those seeking gender-affirming care.” On Tuesday, Walz shared that he is talking to legislators about calling a special session to address gun violence, telling CBS News: “The things that make America unique in terms of shootings is we just have more guns and the wrong kinds of guns that are on the streets.” The fact that the DOJ is considering blocking trans-identifying individuals from owning guns suggests that the Justice Department views the situation very differently. A review by The Daily Wire found that the Annunciation school shooting and the Covenant Christian school shooting are just two examples of a steady stream of transgender-related violence over the past decade. “Democrats have called for common sense gun laws for a long time,” the DOJ official shared on Thursday, adding, “this seems pretty common sense to me.” The move would undoubtedly infuriate those on the left who believe that men can become women and women can become men — and that people who identify as transgender are not mentally ill but merely living in the wrong body. These critics argue that transgender identification is irrelevant when discussing school shootings and that even discussing the topic puts trans-identifying people in danger and should be off limits. In recent years, doctors, therapists, activists, and even President Joe Biden’s administration have argued that people experiencing gender dysphoria will benefit from so-called “gender-affirming care” — transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers — claiming that these gender dysphoric people are more likely to kill themselves if they don’t receive such “care.” Opponents of these measures, including young people who underwent the procedures as teenagers like Chloe Cole, argue that “gender-affirming care” does not mitigate the distress that gender dysphoric people have, but actually often exacerbates mental health issues. Democrats like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have criticized “HATE being directed at our trans community” in the wake of last week’s shooting, claiming that “anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.” Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to President Donald Trump and senior director for counterterrorism, argued on CNN earlier this week that there was an ideological component to the Annunciation school shooting. “What we should do is we should look at the early warning signals, the signs,” he told CNN’s Brianna Keilar, “we should be providing off-ramps, we should be providing mental health options for these individuals.” “I find it hard to believe that an individual goes from getting his mother to sign a change of name certificate, age 17, and then just a handful of years later is mowing down innocent children in a church pew during a Catholic mass, and nobody realized there was a problem,” Gorka argued. “That is what we have to address to save the next children from the next atrocity. It’s not about the sexual proclivities of the individual, it’s the fact that nobody seems to notice a very disturbing pattern towards violence.”

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VANCES PAY THEIR RESPECTS AT ANNUNCIATION CATHOLIC CHURCH ... VP: VP Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance lay flowers at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis in remembrance of the victims of last week’s shooting. (VIDEO)

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Column Anime Spotlight A Spider’s Unsung Industry: Appreciating Kamaji of Spirited Away Hats off to the hardest working spider-person in all of anime! By Leah Thomas | Published on September 4, 2025 Credit: Studio Ghibli Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Studio Ghibli I just started a new job in Tokyo. On day one, I had the not altogether uncommon experience of encountering a devout arachnophobe. I say “devout” because this person, like quite a few others I’ve met, brought up her hatred for spiders unprompted. “If I see one, I will kill it immediately.” If a penchant for arachno-cide is an unfair measure of human compassion, then go ahead and call me biased: I immediately question the character of anyone who squishes a spider. For spider-killers, I reserve the same targeted disdain I also direct at people who brag about using ChatGPT, scalp Pokemon cards, or take off their shoes and socks on airplanes.  Is this fair? Probably not. I know there are primal reasons why so many people loathe spiders. According to Vanessa LoBue, Ph.D., writing for Psychology Today, some research supports the idea that human beings’ fear of spiders is a holdover from prehistoric times, when spiders and snakes were among our most dangerous predators. “Research from my own lab at Rutgers has shown that adults, children, and even babies are really fast to detect the presence of a snake or spider in a series of photographs—faster than we are to detect other objects, like flowers and frogs.” Maybe there’s some merit to that, but she also goes on to say that babies love animals, and, in studies like this one here, play among snakes quite happily. But regardless of whether the fear is learned or not, the act of killing a spider is a choice. My mother, a passionate gardener, revered spiders almost as much as she feared them. She knew they were the ideal predators to place among her daylilies, skillful slayers of mites and aphids and mosquitoes to boot. Though she shrieked and hopped on chairs like a character out of an old cartoon whenever she spotted them, she instructed us kids to “take them outside,” rather than kill them.  As a child I was pretty fond of spiders, maybe because I was and am a Halloween enthusiast, or because like most Michiganders I used to climb trees and encounter them there, or because I read and watched Charlotte’s Web and wept for her, or because there always used to be a spider or two hanging out above our showerhead when I was a kid, like a bonus pet. That affection has not gone away. People learn this, and then it falls to me to capture the office critters that inevitably slip in and get cozy in Japanese workplaces.  I take a certain pride in the act of spider rescue missions, in slapping a paper cup down over one and pushing a notecard between the cup and the flooring and spiriting her away outside. It’s even better when the cup is clear plastic, so I can show her off to shuddering coworkers or delighted students along the way. After, I am careful to roll-step out the door so she doesn’t get too jostled and then find a nice leaf to place her on. I don’t know if they actually care, and sometimes their silk clings to the cup, and they rappel down instead. Sometimes I apologize to them. “Sorry, but you have to stay out here.” In my own home, this is certainly true, as I harbor a furry feline beast who thinks spiders might be fancy kibble. Sometimes a spider does surprise me, or jump out at me, and my heart stutters. And of course I’m not especially pleased when I walk right through a giant, unseen web on a trail or in my own apartment stairwell. But even as I’m cussing and pulling gunk from my hair and face, I find myself admiring the industry.  What? Overnight, little spider, you wove a web from the apartment railing to the door? A distance 100 times your length in a matter of mere hours? I’m a writer with obsessive hyperfocus tendencies: like many authors, I have spent entire weekends awake in front of a keyboard, sleeping hardly at all. But have I ever possessed one ounce of a spider’s sheer perseverance?  Itsy-Bitsy Chihiro Credit: Studio Ghibli Look, maybe I get a bit romantic about these little creatures, but I am far from the first to do so. In many cultures, spiders are symbols of good fortune. According to Swedish superstition, killing a spider will summon a rainstorm. In the UK, finding a money spider in your hair is not a disaster but an omen that money is coming your way. And yes, here in Japan, spiders are, much like worker bees, symbols of diligence and luck. This idea has made its mark on animation, as well, and I doubt any spider in Japan is quite as beloved as the mustachioed spider-man (no, not that one, but a man who is a spider) from Spirited Away. At my last job, one of my coworkers, juggling too many plates and saucers and cups and glasses and frying pans and whatever other metaphorical teaching commitments said, “I wish I were Kamaji! I need eight arms!” I laughed, because I also love and admire Kamaji, and despite his rather small role in a very beloved, fantastical story, he’s pretty unforgettable. Like many characters in Miyazaki’s works, Kamaji has an uncanny verisimilitude to him, like he’s someone you met once when you were a child. He has grandfather energy in the best way.  If anyone needs reminding—or has somehow lived a life without enjoying the undisputed masterpiece that is Spirited Away—Kamaji, a many-limbed yokai, is among the first to show the protagonist, Chihiro, begrudging kindness when she wanders into the spirit world. After she crosses the bridge to the bathhouse, assisted by a mysterious boy named Haku, who tells her to ask for Kamaji, she clambers trepidatiously down a treacherous staircase that clings to the walls beneath the bathhouse and tiptoes into the yokai’s domain: the boiler room. Kamaji is clearly too busy working to worry about a little mortal girl, his long grey arms working the bellows and the mortar and reaching into drawers for herbs and pulling bathwater request tokens from hooks that descend from the towering onsen above. Chihiro asks for a job, and he tells her he has all the workers he needs in the form of magicked little creatures made of soot. He commands his soot sprites to shift heavy coal into the furnace, and continues pulling levers and sipping straight from a teapot without stopping.  Credit: Studio Ghibli Chihiro, almost as stubborn as Kamaji and far more desperate, tries to work anyway, hauling one heavy block of coal towards the fire. When she almost gives up, he calls out to her with some gruff encouragement: “Finish what you started!” When she does exactly that, he softens, and thereafter, he is an unwavering ally of the little human girl, causing trouble in the spirit onsen. Is it only because he respects her dedication, or is it something more? Is he representative of notoriously brutal Japanese work ethic, or perhaps of Miyazaki himself? What, exactly, has led this mysterious old spider to work so arduously in such miserable conditions, trapped working in a dark, hot room while those above him enjoy their ghostly spa days? Well, of course, there is no official answer to these questions. But in admiring Kamaji, I looked into what inspired his creation, and stumbled into yet another fascinating saga of Japanese history and folklore. Those Who Hide in the Ground Kamaji is based on a yokai known colloquially as tsuchigumo. Tsuchi means “soil” or “earth,” and kumo (gumo) means “spider.” Tsuchigumo is not the only spider-inspired yokai, or even the most popularly depicted. That distinction falls to Jorōgumo, an enormous spider that transforms into a beautiful woman in order to lure men to their deaths.  Kamaji’s tsuchigumo has another origin. Language evolves in Japan as it does everywhere, and “tsuchigumo” has come a long way from where it started, thanks in part to how handily Japanese lends itself to wordplay. Tsuchigumo is probably a play on “tuchi go mori,” which means “those who hide in the ground.” This was a derogatory term used to describe rebellious Japanese clans as far back as 1500 years ago. Some of these clanspeople, also known as kuzu, are believed to have lived in the cavern systems in Nara, back when the capital was called Asuka. These clans resisted the rule of the Yamato empire, digging their heels in to defy both imperialism and the arrival of Buddhism. While historically, the Asuka period is known as something of a Japanese renaissance, ushering in new art, architecture, and literacy, for those clans who wished to retain Shintoism and traditional ways of living, it must have been a daunting time. Over the course of less than two hundred years, Japan changed not only its name and primary religion, but also shifted from a diverse collection of divergent clans to an empire.  And any ruler knows, when a minority is giving you trouble, the best retaliation is dehumanization: Spread descriptions of the shamanic people who defy your rule as dirt-scrabblers, as grubby monsters with long arms, as stubborn and bestial in their nature and bearing, and then let hyperbolic whispers and rumors do the rest. While tsuchigumo wasn’t a documented yokai until many centuries after these clans had been routed out and eliminated, the term’s continued use and adaptation is a testament to the notoriety of the word. Tsuchigumo grew, morphing from an insult aimed at a despised minority to the name of many-legged creatures who, according to the earliest stories, devour thousands of people and stash their victims’ skulls in their abdomens.  In a sense, however negative the connotations, the kuzu legacy lives on, contorted by this new definition. It is always hard to say how much of Miyazaki’s symbolism is deliberate and how much is incidental to his art, but in this case, even the name of Kamaji’s inspirational “species” proves remarkably tenacious.  The Spider’s Tenacity Credit: Studio Ghibli Monstrous spiders have not lost their hold over the imagination of Japanese artists. In Dororo, Tezuka wrote of a vicious spider demon masquerading as a beautiful village chief. Rui, a formidable antagonist in Demon Slayer, is a demonic spider. Every monster-girl fetish anime boasts a sexy spider lady. In general, these characters are cunning, duplicitous, and selfish. But another anime, the isekai So I’m a Spider, So What? adopts a less disparaging approach to incorporating an arachnid character. When a classroom full of students die in an explosion and they wake up reincarnated in another world, one girl finds herself trapped in the body of a spider. The author of this fairly popular story, Okina Baba, is a self-described hikkikimori, and certainly knows how it feels to be trapped in the shadows. Is it surprising that the story of a spider making the best of her circumstances would be one Baba would want to write and explore? Like the kuzu in their caverns, people trapped in darkness do not give up on living, persisting however best they can. Kamaji is the quintessential embodiment of so many of these abstract ideas. He works, if not tirelessly, but without apparent resentment or payment; for a creature like Kamaji, the option of not working does not occur. He has all those arms and the ability to use them, and whatever circumstance brought him to a life of glowing goals and hard labor, he does not falter in his work. A spider’s work is her gift and curse; she rebuilds the web because that is all she knows, but she never does it poorly. Is Kamaji’s labor wasted because he does not enjoy the spoils of it? Does Miyazaki, after toiling tirelessly on yet another film that postpones his endless promises of retirement, seem happy about his work? Notoriously, no. No, the famed curmudgeon does not generally appear happy about most things, even though he brings humanity so much joy. Spiders are ingenious, creative creatures. But they are also sinister and duplicitous. According to Japanese superstition, seeing a spider in the morning means you will welcome a guest, but seeing a spider at night means a thief will visit you. To appreciate spiders is to appreciate duality, or contradiction.  The spirit world that Chihiro enters operates by a fundamental rule: in order to survive and retain her humanity, she must work. If she does not, she, like her parents before her, will become livestock. While being forced to work may make these characters—and the rest of us out here in the real world as well—occasionally feel a bit like livestock, but work that you find meaningful can also allow for a sense of purpose. I am so far from wishing a life of labor on anyone in the world, and I am as anti-capitalist as they come. But I have found that in those moments when I do my job well and others benefit from it—be it a student or a reader or any stranger—I am grateful to be alive, and grateful to have made something.  Credit: Studio Ghibli And those who work the hardest are often the most appreciative of the moments when the work stops. Chihiro sits on a balcony with a friend, enjoying a meat bun after a successful day working the baths, looking out at a train that crosses a spectral sea. Kamaji, more than once, is seen slumbering under a quilt, the levers still before him, there before the boiler. A life of hard work is not easy or fair, but it is not without its merits. And a spider never questions that, because it is a spider. It makes and remakes and makes again. Miyazaki, time and again, writes stories that illustrate this human conflict. He crafts movies that champion humanity’s ingenuity and work ethic, but warn against the dangers of a life overwhelmed by work, centered on laboring rather than living. In The Wind Rises, engineer Jiro Horikoshi, inspired by a real person, is admirable because he doggedly pursues a goal, but also worthy of criticism because the planes he works so hard to design are tools of war. In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi works incredibly hard to support her people, mining iron ore at the expense of nature, ruthlessly damaging an ancient, sacred forest. Kamaji works far too hard for his own good, and for what? To offer baths and relaxation to countless fortunate spirits, people he will never meet? We learn he has held onto train tickets to elsewhere for more than forty years, but he does not hesitate to give them to Chihiro. At any time, he might have left the bathhouse behind; he could have escaped the darkness of the boiler room, the thankless hours and poor compensation, but he did not. Perhaps he valued having a purpose and dedicating himself to it, or perhaps there are other reasons—we don’t find out much about his past, and his secrets and motivations remain his own. But even Kamaji pauses his routine in order to lay his blanket over a sleeping child.  Credit: Studio Ghibli Anthropomorphizing spiders is a little silly, I know. Spiders are not considering existential nonsense when they build their webs. But maybe, instead, spiderifying people is a valid experiment, if only because it reminds us that it is all too easy to fall into a working life that resigns us to living in darkness, hidden from the sun and isolated from the people who are helped by or otherwise benefit from our labor. That is not a life to be ashamed of, but nor is there anything wrong with taking those tickets to elsewhere. Wherever spiders go, webs are made: wherever people go, a life is made. No matter what, life is likely to be a mostly unbroken procession of some kind of work or another.  Recently, I got on the train to elsewhere. I left behind a safe, beloved city to pursue the unknown, and I don’t know yet whether it was a great or terrible decision. But I am comforted by the thought that I brought my arms and mind and motivation with me, the tools for rebuilding webs. So many of us die without achieving our goals, but hell, sometimes working towards them is its own achievement. We keep at it, in our caverns or schools or boiler rooms or offices or bedrooms. The result is a life that is, if not well-lived, is never wasted.[end-mark] The post A Spider’s Unsung Industry: Appreciating Kamaji of <i>Spirited Away</i> appeared first on Reactor.